WHY YOU SHOULD KEEP A DREAM JOURNAL !

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The melody for the Beatles classic ‘Yesterday’ came to Paul McCartney in a dream. Einstein was known to have had several headways in his experiments
through dreams he had and recorded.

The above examples point to one thing – dreams can have direct and extraordinary impact on your waking life. But dreams are eeting, and our waking mind
wipes out most of them. How then to channel the potential of your dreams into your waking life? Keep a dream journal.

McCartney and Einstein didn’t just dream those signi cant dreams, they found a way to record, analyze, and assimilate them. Dreams are made of our daily
experiences, images and feelings we encounter in real life. Often they reveal a pattern by connected or recurring themes, and help us know ourselves better.
But that is just the beginning of all the way recording dreams can be great for your brain.

Bene ts of keeping a dream journal

1. It allows you a glimpse into the subconscious

In our waking life, we are not aware of a signi cant chunk of our brain that keeps the deepest part of our mind – like primal emotional instincts like fear and
attraction. When we are asleep, these parts of the brain start their work; for example most of our long-term memory and learning consolidation happens
during the deep sleep state. Our dreams are like a window to these latent parts of our brain. They throw up patterns and images that seem unconnected to
the rational mind, but have deeper connections forged in the subconscious mind.

2. Helps process emotions

First of all, journaling in itself is an amazing stress reducing activity. Taking a quiet moment out of your daily routine to sit down and purely re ect has a
calming e ect on your mental and physical health. It helps resolve many pressing issues. When you are chronicling your dreams, you have a chance to address
issues that go even deeper and have been repressed over time. A huge part of our stress comes from unresolved issues in our past. By o ering a deeper look
at our unconscious, dreams give us an opportunity to discover those issues and take action on them.

3. Unleashes creativity

Creativity is the ability to think laterally, associatively, and connect seemingly unconnected ideas. Dreams, therefore, is the purest form of creativity because
our dream logic is in most part completely di erent from our waking logic. The waking rules of association don’t work in dreams; they match random images
from our long-term memory with random thought processes. For example, you might have recurring dreams of water and drowning in a period of acute stress
in your life. They don’t depict the speci c stressful situation you are having, but they depict the pressure and fear you are feeling by connecting it to the fear of
drowning. When you chronicle and analyze these associations, your waking mind too starts to learn making lateral associations, improving your creative
thinking overall.

4. Preserves great ideas

Dream-thinking often connects ideas and situations in such a way that can have brilliant implications for real life. It may inspire a story or work of art, like the
novel ‘Frankenstein’. Or it may have a completely new way of looking at something which you have been missing all along, like with Einstein’s ideas.

5. Prepares you for stress

In most of us, dreams are seldom happy and peaceful. More often than not we wake up confused, surprised, or even anxious from the things we saw in our
dreams. This happens because dreams occur during REM sleep and this is the time when the Amygdala, or your brain’s fear center is most active. Our ght-or-
ight response or threat response originates from this area. By exercising and inducing stress during our dreams, our subconscious mind is trying to prepare
us for threats that are present but our rational mind has not yet identi ed.

How to keep a dream journal

Keep a diary or writing pad beside your bed so you can scribble it down the moment you wake up and the dream is still fresh.
Write whatever fragments you rst remember. More usually come back through association while writing or even later while going through the dreams
even if you don’t remember them at rst.
Try to record information like date, time, duration of sleep, where you were sleeping (your bedroom, someone else’s house, a ight) while having the
dream etc.
Write down how you felt during the dream and after you woke up. Where you calm, happy, or sweating, trembling, feeling afraid? Did your feelings
during the dream di er from the feeling you had after waking up? Note everything down.
Identify patterns and themes over time, and write what you think they could mean or relate to.

Conclusion
Dreams are a wonderful world to explore, and they hide many deep clues about our own selves and most importantly our brain. Journaling dreams are sure
bene cial, but they are also super fun. Why not give it a go?