Journaling

What should you write in a dream journal?

A useful dream journal entry holds seven things: the date, the dream in your own words, who was there, where it happened, how it felt and how strongly, one line about the day before, and a question to come back to. Those are the details you can still count and compare a month from now.

Last updated: 2026-10-13.

What goes in each field?

Each field should be short enough to fill in half awake, and worth having when you look back.

Which details are worth counting a month from now?

The details worth keeping are the ones dream researchers count. The Hall and Van de Castle system, a set of rules for coding dream reports, counts characters, social interactions, activities, success and failure, misfortune and good fortune, emotions, settings, objects and descriptive details (The Quantitative Study of Dreams, n.d.). It codes settings as indoors or outdoors, and as familiar or not. A home journal doesn’t need every category, but people, places and feelings are quick to note and easy to tally later, when you start finding patterns in your dreams.

Give feelings their own line. The coding rules note that coders are often surprised by how few emotions dream reports mention unless the dreamer is pressed to name them, even when the dream describes something frightening (The Quantitative Study of Dreams, n.d.). The system sorts emotions into five classes, a handy shortlist on a groggy morning: anger, apprehension (fear, anxiety, guilt or embarrassment), sadness, confusion and happiness.

Rate the feelings yourself, good ones included. In a study of diary dreams, the dreamers’ own ratings showed positive and negative emotion in balance (Schredl & Doll, 1998). Outside judges rated the same dreams as more negative, mainly because they underrated the positive feelings.

Why add a line about the day before?

A line about the day before helps because dreams often draw on recent life, though seldom as a replay (Fosse et al., 2003). In that 14-day study, 29 people logged their days as well as their dreams. Of their 299 dream reports, 65% were judged to reflect parts of recent waking life, while no more than 1–2% replayed an actual event.

Feelings seem to matter more than routine (Malinowski & Horton, 2014). In their two-week diary study of 32 people, the waking experiences that turned up in dreams were more emotional than those that didn’t, though no more stressful. Major daily activities appeared less often than personally significant experiences, major concerns and new experiences taken together. So skip the schedule. Write the strongest feeling or worry from yesterday, in one line.

How long should each entry be?

Each entry needs only a few sentences for the dream, plus the quick fields, which makes it small enough to keep up as a daily habit. Among 358 people in one study, those asked to write out every dream in a narrative log recorded fewer dreams each week than those who used a checklist (Zadra & Robert, 2012).

Very short notes are hard to compare later (Domhoff, n.d.). A team led by G. William Domhoff, a dream researcher, studied samples from one woman’s dream journal, which held more than 3,000 dreams. Their content measures held steady once a report reached 50 words, but did not work for shorter ones. About two-thirds of her reports ran between 50 and 300 words. If you plan to count things later, about 50 words is a sensible floor. On a rushed morning, write fragments first, as night 4 of the 7-night dream recall plan suggests, and fill in the rest later.

What does a filled-in entry look like?

A filled-in entry uses every field and ends on an open question.

Example entry, made up for illustration:

• Date: the night of March 3
• The dream: I’m in a library that looks like my old school. I need to return a book, but a librarian I don’t know keeps sending me down aisles that lead back to the same desk. My sister sits behind it, stamping cards, and doesn’t look up. Then there’s water on the floor, as if it had rained indoors. I’m still holding the book when I wake.
• Who was there: my sister, and a librarian I didn’t know
• Where: indoors, a library, partly familiar and partly strange
• Feelings: frustrated (4 of 5), lonely (2 of 5), oddly calm at the end (2 of 5)
• The day before: worried about a report due Friday; didn’t call my sister back
• A question to come back to: where else have I felt that going-in-circles frustration lately?

How do you set it up on paper or in a notes app?

On paper, give each night its own page: the date at the top, the field names down the margin and some room to sketch a place or a face. In a notes app or a document, type the field names once and copy them into a new note each morning. Speaking the dream and typing the fields afterward works too, and the guide to recording your dreams weighs voice against paper.

If you also want to look at your sleep, borrow a few lines from a sleep diary. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM, 2021) offers one that records when you went to bed, woke in the night and woke for the day, plus naps, exercise, caffeine, alcohol and medication. It works best filled in daily, and the AASM describes it as something to share with your health care provider. A diary diagnoses nothing on its own, so bring ongoing sleep problems to a doctor (AASM, 2021; NHS, 2024). Note any medicine you take, but talk to your prescriber before changing one.

Sources

1. American Academy of Sleep Medicine. (2021, March). Sleep diary. Sleep Education. sleepeducation.org/resources/sleep-diary/
2. Domhoff, G. W. (n.d.). Barb Sanders: Our best case study to date, and one that can be built upon. The Quantitative Study of Dreams, University of California, Santa Cruz. dreams.ucsc.edu/Findings/barb_sanders.html
3. Fosse, M. J., Fosse, R., Hobson, J. A., & Stickgold, R. J. (2003). Dreaming and episodic memory: A functional dissociation? Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15(1), 1–9. doi.org/10.1162/089892903321107774
4. Malinowski, J., & Horton, C. L. (2014). Evidence for the preferential incorporation of emotional waking-life experiences into dreams. Dreaming, 24(1), 18–31. doi.org/10.1037/a0036017
5. NHS. (2024, March 19). Insomnia. nhs.uk/conditions/insomnia/
6. The Quantitative Study of Dreams. (n.d.). Coding rules for the Hall/Van de Castle system of quantitative dream content analysis. University of California, Santa Cruz. dreams.ucsc.edu/Coding/
7. Schredl, M., & Doll, E. (1998). Emotions in diary dreams. Consciousness and Cognition, 7(4), 634–646. doi.org/10.1006/ccog.1998.0356
8. Zadra, A., & Robert, G. (2012). Dream recall frequency: Impact of prospective measures and motivational factors. Consciousness and Cognition, 21(4), 1695–1702. doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2012.08.011