Dream Journal
Use this template for your next dream!
Ingredients needed
Journal, Pen, Last nights Dream
How many times have you had a dream and thought “what was that all about?”
Dreams are a way of your unconscious self to send a message up from the depths. Mostly, it is you talking to you and if you listen, you can bring up some hidden treasure from your soul. And at the very least, you clean out that psychic garbage that has been sitting inside you all this time.
Here is a template I use to process my dreams. I’ll start journaling as soon as I wake up, sometimes I use tarot cards to prime my imagination, other times, I’ll just use the images in the dream.
Dream Journal Template
Cast - who showed up in the dream? Most likely, you will see yourself and maybe others you know. Sometimes you will see people you don’t know. All of these people are parts of yourself “played” by different images from your waking life that you may know.
Location - where did the dream take place? The location itself also represents a part of yourself and is often a spiritual landscape.
Events - what happened in the dream? Try to divide it up into scenes started by an incident. Often, you may only have 1 event - that’s ok.
Example
I dreamed that my son and I visited our trailer house and was surprised by the landlord showing up. When he did, he showed us a birdcage inside the house we had never noticed. Then the dream concluded.
Casting in the Dream
My son - my younger and more religious self
Me - my current self, and saw myself struggling in the dream to learn something.
Landlord - an illusionist, magician, who comes and goes and shows me new things.
Location - the trailer house is the theme of sacrifice, martyrdom, and crucifixion (one man for the good of all).
Events - I broke this down into a simple “past, present, future” frame. The past showed the lesson I was supposed to learn as a young man, the present was the current lesson I struggled to learn and the future was the hope of a continued story.
Insight
In this dream, I gathered quickly the themes of Christianity and my childhood faith. I also gathered that the landlord didn’t have a god like omniscience, but was only trying to show me something I had never seen before - an aspect of my faith that could expand, but needed to be set free, like a bird in a cage.
The trailer house was used for many purposes in the past, but always brought people into the house for holidays (a scene I remember now as I write). The landlord showed me that the bird could also leave the house.
When I woke, I know that this dream confirmed something I have worked with in my waking life for about 3 years now - my faith expands. This dream helped identify some lessons that I should have learned in childhood, that I’m now getting to re-learn.
“The taste of medicine, while often bitter, helps us only use it when we absolutely need it for healing. The same can be said of an accurate, and truthful, word.”
Also, notice how I brought my younger self into the dream. While my faith has expanded the last 3 years, I have never “deconstructed” or abandoned my faith. While hard for some people to accept (I would be called backslidden) my faith has never been lost, and has simply expanded.
Dreams are wonderful things. Journaling them helps organize the soul so we can move easier through our waking lives without encumbrance of a cluttered mind.