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CREATING A DREAM
WISDOM JOURNAL
Alan Siegel, Ph.D.
Copyrighted Excerpt from
Dream Wisdom: Uncovering Life’s Answers in your Dreams
by Alan Siegel, Ph.D. (Berkeley: Celestial Arts, 2003)
The most valuable book on dreams you’ll ever read is the one that your
write yourself: your personal dream journal. Writing dreams down
reinforces your ability to remember them and activates feelings,
associations, memories, and insights that might have been neglected.
The type of journal you select is not a crucial factor. A spiral notebook,
three-ring binder, sketch pad, or clipboard will work just as well as a
specially purchased journal. A night light or flashlight can be valuable
for writing down dreams during the night if you don’t want to disturb your
spouse or partner.
Don’t become so obsessive about writing your dreams and organizing your
journal that it becomes a chore. Quality is more important than quantity.
One dream explored in depth is more valuable than a month’s worth of
dreams that remain untouched and invisible in your journal.
A crucial advantage of keeping a journal is that it gives you the
opportunity to review a series of dreams. A dream series presents a more
complete view of your inner life than does one dream. In your journal you
can observe recurring characters, emotional themes, and situations that
may not have been apparent initially. Often a repetitive theme or
character alerts you to a situation or relationship that is unresolved or
undergoing transition.
There are many techniques for structuring a dream journal. Most people who
maintain an ongoing journal devise their own method of organization. In my
dream seminars I recommend using the following phrase as a mnemonic device
for beginning your associations and organizing your journal:
REVIEW -
KEY - DREAM
- FACETS.
1) REVIEW: Go over emotionally charged events of the previous day
or two. Picture people’s faces and your recent interactions with them..
Make notes in your dream journal in the evening.
2) KEY: Jot down the key words and phrases that come to mind just
as you awake. Use these keys to unlock the rest of your dream. With the
keys, you can reconstruct the dream later in the day if your time is
limited in the morning.
3) DREAM: Use the keys as a framework for reconstructing your
dream. Write as quickly as you can to avoid the temptation to censor or
compose your dream. By faithfully writing all elements of the dream, even
those that seem disorganized, you can later harvest the richer nuances of
meaning.
4) FACETS: This acronym stands for feelings, associations,
characters, ending, title, summary. The sequence of following the FACETS
steps provides a guide for organizing and cataloguing your responses to a
dream.
F—FEELINGS. Make a note about
the positive and negative emotions that arise in the dream, such as
sadness, sexual desire, guilt, anger, joy, love. Also note the quality
of your mood when you awoke.
A—ASSOCIATIONS. Write down ideas, insights, memories, and hunches
that come to mind as you contemplate the dream. It is best to brainstorm
and not worry about whether your ideas seem relevant to the dream.
C—CHARACTERS. Identify the characters. Who do they remind you of?
How are your relating with them in the dream? Keep in mind that dreams
often merge attributes of different people or portray a character as a
disguised reference to someone else.
E—ENDING. How does the dream conclude? Is the ending resolved,
partially resolved or unresolved? The degree of resolution correlates
with what stage you have reached in resolving the dilemmas that the
dream is addressing.
T—TITLE. Create a title for your dream that describes a crucial
element and will help you remember it when you’re rereading your journal
or analyzing a dream series.
S—SUMMARY AND STRATEGIES FOR CHANGE. Summarize the main themes of
your dream and try to link them with important issues you’re facing in a
current turning point or in situations and relationships in your life.
Based on your summary of this dream, what ideas or strategies for change
can you think of?
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