Keeping a Dream Journal: How to Evaluate Your Progress

Tracking your dreams over time can reveal new dimensions of self-knowledge.

Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

Key points

• Dream journals provide a mirror of your most important concerns in waking life.
• A long series of dreams offers insights about the emotional quality of your relationships.
• The practice of dream journaling can stimulate more openness to surprise and wonder.

A long-term series of dreams can be an amazing resource for gaining psychological insights into your waking life. However, for people who track their dreams in a handwritten journal or through an online app, the question eventually arises of how to evaluate your progress. It’s natural to ask: Is the practice working?

When Freud speaks of the liberating effects of self-knowledge, when Jung speaks of the actualized wholeness of individuation, how are you to know if you are moving in the right direction? How can you reach the goal more quickly and avoid the problems of falling short? According to Freud, until you gain true self-awareness your ego is fragile, defensive, and besieged by instinctual impulses. For Jung, until you are fully individuated you are a mere fragment of your potential self, alienated from your core and projecting your weaknesses onto others. The sooner your dream journaling practice becomes an effective force in your life, the sooner you can overcome these problems and grow into your true self.

To be clear, this can never be a fast or simple process. The insights that come from dream journaling are best understood as the organic emergence of your inner potential, not as predetermined steps toward a fixed destination. The practice of following your dreams over time carries you along a path of psychological growth that is yours and yours alone.

That said, powerful discoveries can and do occur in the earliest phases of keeping a dream journal. Here are three valuable lessons that many people gain soon after beginning the practice.

Waking-Dreaming Continuities

It does not take long—maybe a couple of weeks, maybe a dozen or so dreams—to begin seeing underlying patterns and regularities. By the time you have gathered 100 or more dream reports, you have enough material to enable you to identify a variety of interesting and meaningful features that recur with predictable frequency. First and foremost, you can see several types of dream content that correlate with important aspects of your waking life. Researchers call these continuities, which are helpful to identify because they show how dreaming can be an accurate mirror of your deepest interests, concerns, hopes, and fears. The more you dream about something—a place, a color, a situation—the more likely it has strong emotional resonance for you.

Over time, you can assemble these continuities, analyze them, and reflect on what they signify as a psychological collage of your life. Many people find that once they identify the basic patterns, they can then go on to discern subtle variations in dream content at different stages of time, which reveal deeper developmental currents at work in their dreaming. One discovery leads to the next in a spiraling dialectic of curiosity, insight, and growth. For those who seek to live according to the Delphic maxim, “Know thyself,” tracking your dreams over time can be a potent resource.

Relationships

Personal relationships are one of the strongest continuities in most people’s dreams. You tend to dream most often about the most important social relations in your waking life. Family, friends, co-workers, neighbors, and pets appear with special frequency in dreaming. It is true that some dreams present nothing but total strangers or have no other characters at all. But over time, across hundreds of dreams, it becomes crystal clear who you care about the most. The people for whom you feel the greatest emotional connection and concern tend to appear the most in your dreams. These people (and animals) may not live near you, they may have been part of another phase of your life, they may even have passed away long ago, but they can still be emotionally vital and present figures in your ongoing sense of self.

Over time, you can create a cast of characters for your dreams, an oneiric dramatis personae, and trace each figure’s comings and goings across the stage of your nightly sleep. This is where keeping a dream journal can enhance the quality of your relationships, because the dreams are in a continual dialogue with your social experiences in waking life. Once you tune into this dialogue, it can help you better understand the unconscious dynamics of how you relate to your family and friends. By reflecting on the recurrent patterns of characters, emotions, and social interactions within your dreams, you discover new dimensions of yourself within these I-Thou relationships.

Wonder and Synchronicity

There is no predicting such things, but people who keep a dream journal often begin to notice at some point the occurrence of unusual phenomena and strange coincidences between their dreaming and waking lives. It may be something as simple as dreaming of a hawk and then seeing a hawk the next day, or dreaming about a bad storm and then hearing news about dangerous flooding where a friend lives. It may be more dramatic, as in experiences of coincidence that seem so anomalous that you cannot help but think about the possibilities of precognition, telepathy, and shared consciousness. Regardless of whether they can or cannot be causally explained, these strange dreaming/waking coincidences, which Jung called synchronicities, indicate a growing sensitivity toward your intimate relatedness with the world around you. Whatever forms these synchronicities take for you, their psychological value is to enhance your openness to the surprise and wonder that can be found in every aspect of existence.

Knowing yourself in depth, knowing yourself in relation to others, knowing yourself as a microcosm within the macrocosm—these are the realms of insight that are often the first to be discovered when keeping a dream journal. They stand as early guideposts marking the real, tangible progress you are making in your lifelong journey toward becoming who you truly are.