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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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