Q: Like you, I am a prolific dreamer, and over the years I’ve amassed piles of dream journals. I’m wondering, how do you organize all of your dreams and journals, and how do you manage to locate a particular dream in a particular book? Do you number or name your dream journals? Do you keep your dreams on your computer so you can search for key words?

Signed,

Drowning in Dreams

A: Dear Drowning,

First, grab onto this life preserver! Let’s get you to shore.

Now that we’re on dry land, I’ll share one of my favorite quotes from Robert Frost:

“I am overtired, from this great harvest I myself desired.”

From “After Apple Picking,” which no one but me thinks of as a dream poem.

What Frost and I are saying is this: your bountiful dream harvest is a good problem to have. There are plenty of dreamers out there who would look with envy on your Mount Everest of Dream Journals! But we don’t want the weight of them to be a burden! Allow me to continue mixing metaphors and say that dreams themselves should be a sort of life raft to carry you over the cresting waves of emotion and experience on life’s journey. They should not drag you down.

Embrace creative chaos, too

That said, before I help you organize those journals, I want to put in a plug here for the joys of getting lost. I for one will spend hours browsing in a bookstore rather than efficiently order a specific title online. I prefer getting lost in a new city over using GPS to help me get from my hotel to the museum. That’s because I cherish the unexpected joys I stumble on along the way. It’s the same with my dream journals. If I ever achieved some gold-standard of organization, I could beam into exactly the dream I was looking for in moments. But I’d miss out on the delight of discovering a long-forgotten dream report that has serendipitous resonance with my current situation. I’d miss out on finding answers I didn’t know I was looking for.

Besides, dreams and journaling are part of the creative mess that sparkles at the center of my life. I’d never want my collection to be too tidy.

But some level of organization is certainly helpful. So, let’s work on getting those journals of yours (a little more) organized. Here are some of the methods I use:

1. Place a sticker on the outside of each journal with the dates that are covered within. When I’m super-organized (like when there’s a pandemic outside and I’m spending inordinate amounts of time at home, for example) I also keep a list of major wake life and dream events on the inside front cover or first page of each journal.
2. Devote the last page of each journal to creating an index of dreams, including a one-line entry for each dream with the date, dream title, memorable images or dream characters, etc.
3. In addition to the above, I also keep a computer file where I type up significant dreams. These are dreams that come in response to a dream incubation (when I asked for a dream on a particular topic) or that fall in the category of “Big Dreams” (memorable dreams with archetypal characters, unusual clarity, and/or divine wisdom). Having these dreams on the computer helps me easily search for and locate them with a few keystrokes.

Join my FREE Dream Journal 101 Mini-Course and receive a Dream Index …

PLUS more information on keeping and organizing your Dream Journals.

I hope that you’ll soon be swimming along with new ideas and methods for tracking your dreams, and transforming your journaling practice into one helps you stay afloat in the sea of dreams.

May you dream, journal, and be well,

Tzivia