All of us know of someone who has a personal journal. It can be an empty paper book, a phone app or even a website. The concept is simply to write things into this journal on a daily, weekly, monthly or whatever cadence works for you. Some people write about their relationships, their work, the important things that happen to them and so on. The cliché type of personal journal entry would be something like “Dear journal, today was a great day, I …” As the name indicates, a personal journal is, well, personal. It’s usually not meant to be shared (even though some people might try to find your personal journal out of curiosity) and it is mostly a way to self reflect, to re-read one’s past thoughts and to see how one has changed over the years.
A dream journal plays a similar role for your dreams. It is a way to write down your dreams when you wake up, to help you reflect upon them, remember them, understand them and so on. Lucid dreamers often use a dream journal to help them identify clues in their dreams, that they were in fact dreaming, thereby triggering a lucid dream.
In the past, dream journals where all written by hand, since there wasn’t any technology like mobile apps and so on that one could use to write down dreams. While most people would usually just write down the text of their dreams, some would actually draw the scenes they could remember from their dreams. Thereby turning their dream journal into a wonderful set of drawings, imported straight from their imagination.
With the arrival of the App Store and smart phones more generally, developers started to build apps to add some magic to dream journaling. Once the limitation of paper dream journals removed, new powerful features could be created for dream journalling. For example:
Still, those features are really add-ons to the key feature any dream app needs to have, namely the ability to easily write down dreams. There are many dream journal apps, the most popular ones can be found here. We hope this little guide helped you to understand what a dream journal is and how to use it!
