Dreams are very common and fascinating aspects of human life. Every time we sleep, we dream of something we may or may not remember. While some consider dreams mere fantasies, others like to interpret them and derive meaning. Dreams reflect our subconscious mind, and we can understand our psyche by analyzing them. That's why having a good dream journal and tracking your dreams is recommended!

1. Keep a Dream Journal#

Keeping a dream journal is the first and easiest step. Many people simply use pen and paper for journaling, which is fine. However nowadays it’s possible to go further with digital tools. For instance, Oniri is an advanced dream journal to help you analyze and interpret your dreams accurately. With Oniri, you can keep track of every detail about your dreams: dream type, emotions, context, characters, symbols, places, etc…

Choose your preferred method for dream journaling, in the end it’s up to you. Grab a notebook, download an app, or whatever suits you! Once you have a good dream journal, you’re ready to go. Journal every single detail and in whichever language you’re comfortable expressing.

Download Oniri for: iOS / Android

2. Record Your Dreams#

After getting a dream journal, it's time to start journaling. If you're journaling for goal setting, it can be a little difficult, but with time, you'll master the art of journaling. As soon as you wake up, take a few minutes to reflect on your dreams and write down as much detail as possible. It’s important to do it as quickly as possible, because the memories of your dreams will vanish very quickly after waking up. Journaling dreams is recommended when it's most vivid in your mind.

Try to be consistent with this practice and do it every morning. Sometimes you won't remember anything, sometimes very fuzzy details. Even then, write down something in your journal. This trains your dream memory, and the training effect is real: in one study, 45 people who all reported zero dream recall in the previous month were split in two, and the group simply encouraged to remember their dreams went from nothing to 68% recalling a dream, against 32% of the group who were only asked about them.^[1] Nothing else changed. Larger surveys point the same way, finding that attitude toward dreams predicts how many you remember.^[2]

3. Interpret Your Dreams#

Now that you have a dream journal with many dreams recorded, you can start analyzing your dreams, finding insights, and setting goals. It's important to find and understand dream patterns and symbols. Knowing how frequently you're getting a specific dream or symbol in your dream will help you analyze the right elements. Try to understand your emotions while dreaming and analyze all the characters and places.

While analyzing your dreams, connect all the dots: symbols, thoughts, emotions, people, places. Try to understand what your subconscious mind is saying. It's very important to look at your dreams in the context of your waking life and goals.

Two research findings make this step less speculative than it sounds. First, dreams do track waking life in a measurable way: the amount of time you spend on an activity roughly predicts how often it appears in your dreams, which is why your journal is a usable record of what's actually occupying you rather than a random image generator.^[3] Second, structured reflection on a dream produces real insight: in a controlled comparison, people who worked through a recent dream in a guided discussion reported significantly more personal insight than people who worked through a recent waking event the same way.^[4]

One practical note. Meaning comes from the series, not from a single entry. Researchers studying long dream series find a person's dream profile is remarkably consistent over years, and that what someone cares about can be inferred from the pattern.^[5] So don't try to extract a life goal from Tuesday's dream. Read twenty entries at once and ask what keeps showing up.

If you want to learn more about the process of analyzing your dreams, read our articles about how to interpret your dreams and the different ways to analyze your dreams!

4. Set Goals#

Once you're done with your dream analysis, it's time to set up goals based on the insights you derived. This is the most crucial part of the process. Now that you know a bit more about yourself, identify the areas in your life that need improvement. Those areas can be anything: your career, relationships, health, personal growth, etc…

You can also set goals in a new area of your life. Insights and inspirations are key factors if you are dream journaling for goal setting.

Make the goal specific, not inspiring#

This is where most dream-derived goals die, so it's worth borrowing from the goal-setting research directly.

Decades of studies converge on a finding that is slightly annoying: specific and difficult goals produce better performance than vague encouraging ones. "Do your best" reliably underperforms a concrete target.^[6] So "be less anxious about work", which is the kind of thing a dream journal tends to hand you, is exactly the shape of goal that doesn't work.

Convert it. If your journal keeps returning to being unprepared and exposed, the goal is not "feel more confident". It's something you could tell whether you did: submit the proposal by Friday without asking three people to check it first.

Then decide when and where#

There's a second technique worth knowing, because it addresses the gap between intending something and doing it. An implementation intention is a plan in the form when situation X arises, I will do Y. Specifying the when and the where in advance has been shown across many studies to substantially raise follow-through, apparently because it hands control to the situation rather than leaving it to willpower in the moment.^[7]

Applied here:

• Insight: my dreams keep putting me in confrontations I back away from.
• Goal: raise the workload issue with my manager this month.
• Implementation intention: when our Thursday one-to-one starts, I will say it in the first five minutes.

That's the whole bridge from dream to action, and it's the step most dream-journaling advice skips.

5. Take Action#

Now that you’ve got the goals, it's time to take the required actions! Follow your goals the best you can and try to improve the areas in your life that you identified. These goals can improve your relationships, help you to develop new skills, or make you a better person. Once you reach this stage, your goal-setting practice is worth it.

Conclusion#

Dream journaling and dream analysis can help you understand your subconscious mind and set up goals. Start keeping track your dreams, setting goals that can change your life, and become the best version of yourself!