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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?
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