If you take a medication, you can’t not take the medication for a week and then take seven days’ worth all at once.
If you exercise, you can’t not exercise for a week and then do a week’s worth of push-ups, sit-ups, and jumping jacks all at once.
It’s the same thing with dream journaling. You can’t make little notes all week long and then do a week’s worth of interpreting all at once.
It doesn’t work that way.
It’s too much.
Some of those dreams are going to be inspired by seemingly inconsequential events in your day. Two days from now, your conscious mind will have completely forgotten all about them. Maybe the attitude with how you approached the inconsequential event won’t have changed, but your opportunity to have reviewed what you learned from it will have dissipated.
You probably won’t understand the reference later.
When you learn something, your brain makes neural connections. Even if the brain is an amazing organ capable of holding a lot of information, things are forgotten all of the time. It has to be this way. If it wasn’t, the brain would grow too crowded and you couldn’t think.
Your individual results may vary, but you usually have a couple of days to get all of the references your brain may be making in the dream. If you don’t write the dream down and try to understand what it was about before then, you might not understand the point. It may turn out to be as good as if the dream had happened to someone else.
Or not.
Self-knowledge is important. Don’t take the chance.
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James Cobb, RN, MSN, is an emergency department nurse and the founder of the Dream Recovery System. His goal is to provide his readers with simple, actionable ways to improve their health and maximize their quality of life.
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