I’ve Been Writing Down my Dreams for 5 Years. Here’s What I’ve Learned.
To be honest, I have no idea what possessed me to write down the dream I had the night of July 1, 2016, in my notes app. It wasn’t anything groundbreaking or particularly funny, but I did. Then six days later I wrote down the next dream I woke up and remembered, and I’ve been doing it ever since.
Obviously, there’s probably some missing here and there, as sometimes I’ll only remember little pieces of them so it’s not worth it, or (this has happened more than a few times) I’ll wake up from a dream at 3:00 am, start to write it down, and then fall asleep in the middle of doing so and never finish. In the span of all of these years, this note has gotten ridiculously long. On average I’d say I write down about one or two every week, but sometimes it’s more, sometimes it’s less.
I took a psychology class my spring semester freshman year that I really enjoyed.
If I wasn’t studying communications, I have a feeling I would be studying some form of psych. So when we began to talk about dreams in class I was immediately invested. We had an assignment where we had to write down a recent dream and analyze it. The writing down part was nothing new to me, but the analysis part was something I had surprisingly never done. Usually, I would just write it down, occasionally tell some people it if it was particularly out of the box or funny, and then leave it. So looking deeper into why I had the dream I had was super interesting.
That assignment led me to do the same thing with some of my other past dreams.
I began to piece together that a lot of them weren’t actually random, but instead had a lot of parallels to either things I had been thinking about on certain days, big events happening, or people I had been with recently. For example in the weeks leading up to my senior prom, I had dreams about taking pictures and being at semi-formals. In 2017 on weeks I was camping in the summer the campground I was at and the people I was with would show up in my dreams. The months before concerts I would dream about being at them. The summer before I moved into college I had dreams about moving to a different house or living in a dorm. This is something that seems obvious, but I never really put two and two together until I took that class.
I get a range of reactions when I tell people I have a log of every dream I can remember for the past 5 years.
The most common is just, “how?” And like I said earlier, I don’t know! It just kind of happened. I started writing them down and just never stopped. It’s become such a routine for me now. I’ve always been a person take videos/pictures of or write down moments I want to remember, so I guess it’s no different with dreams. Other people think it’s strange, and others think it’s awesome. Some of my family members have told me to compile them all into a book one day. I’m not too sure if you’ll ever see it in Barnes & Noble, but you never know.
For me personally though, I love having all of my dreams with me. Some of them are so hilarious and unforgettable, and others I couldn’t begin to picture if I tried, so having them all in one spot is pretty cool. It’s fun to look back on them and relive certain situations or times in my life with people who are in or maybe not in my life anymore.
So if you’re reading this and wondering if you should start writing down all of your dreams, I say do it.
My note titled “dreams” has become a collection of a twisted version of a lot of my memories.
It’s the hilarious, ridiculous, nostalgic journal I never meant to write.