Dream Journaling: Tap Into Your Inner Wisdom for Guidance & Healing
Your dreams are filled with wisdom to guide you through every aspect of your life.
They give you access to knowledge beyond your ordinary, everyday awareness. They can show you the future, preparing you for challenges and opportunities. They can speak to your past, providing you with clues for healing old wounds. And they can guide you in the present, offering you wisdom for making the best decisions and honoring your soul’s desires.
A powerful way to start tapping into the wisdom of your dreams is to keep a dream journal.
Why you should keep a dream journal
The benefits of dream journaling are as vast as the realms your dreams take you to. Here are just a few of my favorite reasons to keep a dream journal.
Healing, transformation, and growth:
When you look back on your dream journals, you hold up a magic mirror that can reveal patterns in long-standing challenges. Your dream journal can even serve you as a data log that gives you insight into themes regarding your attitudes, beliefs, experiences, and actions.
You can also get precognitive glimpses of things that appear in your waking world later on. Dream journaling helps you develop a sixth sense, opening you to correct a course you’re on, restore your inner compass, expand your consciousness, or develop telepathic or clairsentient skills.
Brain balance:
Dream journaling can benefit your corpus callosum — the part of the brain that joins the right and left hemispheres, physically connecting your intuitive abilities with your analytic abilities.
In “Dreams Make Me Smarter,” one of our students wrote: “I let the dream images come to me, then write the dream in my journal, which engages my left brain. I pay close attention to any right-brain feelings about the dream. Then I brainstorm about any associations with those images or feelings. Working with dreams is a whole-brain exercise!”
Creativity:
Dreams offer you a treasury of images and symbols that can light your creative fire if you’re an artist. And even if you’re not, recording your dreams can inspire you to tap into the creativity inside you that yearns to be expressed.
Sketch that mountain or underwater temple when you wake up, then turn it into a deeply expressive painting or sculpture! Write down a dream-encounter as a short story, or see how it’s a clue into how to finish a scene you’ve been working on for your novel. Record that guitar line that came to you in your dreams. Whatever ways you express yourself — or would like to express yourself — journal your dreams to ignite your imagination.
How to keep a dream journal
Choose a notebook or a specially-crafted dream journal with thick, high-quality paper that you can joyfully write and sketch in.
Keep your journal near your bed and write your dreams in it as soon as you wake up. If you find that your bedside notes are barely legible, try transcribing them into a Google Doc later in the day.
While I suggest charging your phone away from your bedroom at night (so you can get a nightly retreat from constant digital clutter and melatonin-disturbing blue light), another option is to record a voice note as soon as you wake up. Then use a voice-to-text program to transcribe your dreams.
Ready to start recording the wisdom of your dreams?
Here are 5 journaling prompts to get you started:
- When was the dream? Note the date (including the year) so you can look back on the entry in the context of what was going on in your life and the world at the time.
- What happened in the dream? The key is to record your dream in as much detail as you can. Where were you? What was it like? What were the events? What did you do? Was anyone else there? What did they do or say? When did the dream take place? What did the events remind you of? If a detail seems too trivial or obvious to note, write it down anyway. When you look back on your dream entries, you’ll find that what might have seemed like useless details are highly significant in retrospect.
- What did you think or feel during the dream? Your internal experience is one of the most (if not THE most) telling aspects of your dreams. Did you feel elated, joyful, rejected, connected, relieved, anxious, relaxed, fascinated, blessed? Did you think “This reminds me of the time I…” Or maybe you thought “This is a place I’d love to….” Whatever your interior response was, make a note of it.
- How does the dream connect to your highest desires? This year, Spirit is really calling us to focus on what we want to create in our lives on this beautiful planet. We all long for something. Look back on the things you’ve desired in your past that you’ve manifested. That’s evidence that goals come to fruition, that “dreams come true”! So think about what you want at this point in your life. A new house? Healing from an illness? A fulfilling relationship? A rewarding career that suits your soul? Clean waterways? The end of injustice? Jot down anything about your dream that seems connected to your longing.
- What do you think the dream means? Don’t worry right away about dream interpretations like “owls represent wisdom” — you can look those up later if you’d like. For now, focus on writing down what significance the feelings, events, people, and images of the dream have for you. Because it’s your dream, you have the most insight into what it’s telling you.
Tap into the creative, healing wisdom of your dreams now!
If you want to start journaling right now, write down your response to one of these prompts:
- Last night I dreamed…
- When I was a child, I dreamed…
- The best dream I ever had was…
- A recurring dream I’ve had is…
- The other day I had the strangest dream…
Start writing now or when you wake up tomorrow, and watch the wisdom flow from your soul, through your pen, and into your life.
Dream on!
To learn more about tapping into the power of your dreams, you can checkout my course on Astral Wisdom here.
