Journaling your dreams is easy. These are all the things you need to be able to journal your dreams:

A notebook, notepad, or diary to write in

A pen or pencil to write with

Dreams to write

Out of those three things, the last one seems to be the most difficult. Many people believe they do not dream, and that, as a consequence, they simply can not journal their dreams. This is not true. Everyone dreams, some people just remember it less often. I used to be one of those people. Then I went from no dreams in over a month to multiple dreams every night in less than a week, by doing two things:

Tell yourself you are going to remember your dreams

Immediately write down your dreams once you wake up

I find that if I do not actively tell myself that I am going to remember my dreams, I most likely won’t. If I tell myself, before falling asleep: “Tonight I am going to remember my dreams, and once I wake up I will immediately write them down,” I do, 9 out of 10 times, remember my dreams. Often not just one but multiple. Once you wake up, it is important to actually write down your dreams immediately, and being able to write down your dreams immediately requires planning. See, you can’t write them down “get out of bed, walk to your desk, get out your diary and start writing” immediately. It should be more of a “my alarm clock is still ringing and I haven’t even opened my eyes yet” kind of immediately.

Once you wake up, your dream is removed from your active consciousness. It is still somewhere in your memory, but compare it to an unlabeled book in a library with millions of other unlabeled books. You will not find that memory again, ever. The neural pathways between the cluster that is that dream and the rest of your brain are so underdeveloped that you just won’t be able to activate them. A lonely cluster of dream neurons, never to be interacted with again. That is, unless you manage to strengthen a neural pathway to that dream before it leaves your consciousness, which it usually does in just a few seconds.

I kept my notebook open on my night table, an open pencil laying next to it, and I set my alarm on my phone which was also lying on my night table, so I could, when my alarm went off, turn off the alarm and start writing in less than a second. I would just write down as many keywords as I could. Quantity is very important here. The word “monkey” has almost limitless neural connections. If you just have the word “monkey” written down, any of the thousands of stronger neural pathways will activate and you will not remember your dream. The same principal applies to every word. When you write down multiple words, the amount of other interfering neural pathways decreases exponentially. You may have a hundred thousand connections to the word “monkey”, and a hundred thousand connections to the word “space”, but how many neurons do you have that link to both “monkey” and “space”? What if you add a third, or a fourth word to that? I can confidently say that the dream in which I was stuck on a space station with a group of angry sunglasses-wearing French chimpanzees is the only memory in my entire mind that connects to not just “monkey” and “space”, but also “sunglasses” and “escape”. **