Dream FACETS: Journal Keeping Guidelines

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)

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 A C E T S

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?