Start Dream Journaling! (Day 5)

Date: August 5, 2026

Last modified: August 5, 2026 (05:55 UTC)

I think one of the coolest things any person can do is dream journal. I know what many of you are probably thinking: I don’t remember my dreams, I forget them instantly upon waking up, they are boring, etc. These are all something (well… maybe except the last one) that can be easily changed by starting a dream journaling habit. It’s something that I do almost every morning, and the only times I haven’t has been when I decided to go back to sleep or I, in my foolish fugue state, believe that I will surely remember this dream and can write it down later. Spoiler alert: I never remember.

I began fully dream journaling in 2023, managing to record a dream for every night from January to July. This habit started because it was during my regular phases where I decide I need to fix my entire life and wake up at 5AM. As a result, my alarm would go off during the middle of a REM cycle, which makes it pretty darn easy to remember a dream. Over time as I stopped waking up extremely early, because I had the habit of recording my dreams, I still retained a pretty good dream recall. Dream journaling had become such a strong habit that I could remember each time I entered the dreaming section of my REM sleep, except in the subsequent dream I would write down the events of the previous dream so I could let myself forget what happened since I believed I had a record…

Obviously, you don’t need to do this (nor should you) to start dream journaling. The first thing I do upon waking up if I really can’t remember anything is to think of stuff that frequently appears in your dreams. Was it in a school? Were your parents involved? Just try and think hard about anything you can remember. Often times I’m able to remember one tiny detail and from there I can expand upon the dream. The goal is to write down as much detail as possible, as often times you will remember another section of the dream from a singular detail.

I found that dream journaling also had the benefit of making nightmares less scary for me. Of course I would still have instinctual reactions of fear, but it is much easier for me to assure myself that this is just a dream. In fact, I actually start to get excited when I have nightmares, because that means that I can use this dream as inspiration for stories to write!

I hope to make my dream journal public, but the main thing I’m struggling with is to what detail I would like to write. I don’t mind censoring people’s names (as long as I have a key so later I can decipher it), but the problem comes with dreams whose main focus is me committing violence or having sex. I don’t want to censor my own dreams, especially since that tarnishes the record, but having it on a public website does invite scrutiny that may use dreams to interpret my own character. For example, I do frequently have dreams where I murder someone, but I interpret them as a reflection of my anxiety over dealing with the consequences of my actions, doing something that I can not go back on no matter what I do, and facing the anger and disappointment of others. So this will be something that I’m going to think about for a while!

As a little treat, here’s an assorted collection of dreams from my dream journal:

May 16, 2026

I was with The Lovers and I was driving him around his home city. Originally we were going to get pizza together, but it was around 3AM so they were all obviously closed. Outside of the Pizza Hut was a really cool linking car, though, so we talked about that. I had a vision of him with an ex-girlfriend eating pizza together and complaining about how expensive it was, though, so I wanted to get away from there as soon as possible. As such I decided we should go to Dunkin and I managed to convince him to come along by promising to get him a donut.

October 24, 2025

I was with The Devil and Ten of Wands. We were at a Pokémon festival that Fort Wayne held. There was a lot of water, I think it recently rained, as a lot of people were rafting on the water. At certain points the water was actually rising, which Strength told me was natural, yet this was a high amount.

Somehow, I ended up back home, where I then used my phone’s GPS to navigate with my friends. I was nowhere near them, but a fake me was walking with them. Fake me then turned into a Machamp that was swatting at them. I decided to go back and tell them about this. Their GPS said they were now near my house, except I forgot to put on socks and shoes. This strange, new IAL (international auxiliary language) app said they were frustrated at me via an audio message (it translated from the IAL to English). As I was leaving, my dad said he’d want this shrimp butternaught squash with “true essence”. I left, but outside was pitch black. I couldn’t see them, but turning on my flashlight I saw them coming lcoser with their flashlights. However, it wasn’t them. It was these two girls acting strangely. I asked if they saw The Devil and Ten of Wands, but they said “nooooo…..” yet told me to follow them. I did, and they gav eme a large lollipop. I inferred from this that the lollipop were laced and The Devil and Ten of Wands were kidnapped.

I arrived at their location, which was my house. I sprinted away and saw Three of Cups. I quickly realized this was all fake and was in fact for a Halloween video project.

I was in Dr. C’s study abroad class and it was the final day. One person came in with a skirt that had fake dead foxes on it, and Dr. C asked her to leave. She kept asking, but only stopped when the girl said she was vegan.

I got some books about redesigning German, but the seller was mean to me when he thought it was secular German. I got a wizard book for my dad.

September 21, 2025

Me and The High Priestess got really into a sport called Christian bowling. It’s done in churches in three connected bowl shaped areas, with each taller than the last. There’s five people in each round. I was not sure on how you could move the ball since you weren’t allowed to kick or throw the ball, which was a bowling ball, nor did I know how to score. We were watching these middle or high school boys play, which was the most popular divison. It got really heated and one guy wanted to fight, but the other guy picked him up by the scruff and threw him out the area.

August 9, 2025

I was with Three of Swords at my house. We were playing a game of D&D (just the two of us), when a third person arrived. We knew him within the lore of the dream, but he forced us outside. He planned on killing us, but kept setting stuff up and doing monologues. Apparently he did not like what our characters were doing, as it impacted his cahracter negatively, and so he decided to kill us. Suddenly, two people came outside and I shouted that he was trying to mruder us. I sprinted away. I survived the encounter, but I’m not sure if others did. Outside, I kept running until I saw a police officer. I told him what happened, but the way I said it made it seemed absolutely unbelievable and he told me off. I then called 911 and they believed me. I went back home and I gave a testimony to a woman who made me play some games (potentially as a psych eval), with one of them being coloring in Drag Race dresses.

I worked at the farmers’ market. Today was my first day by myself, but it had been a bit since I last worked so I forgot everything. While setting up, this woman came over and started perusing. This stressed me out as I hadn’t started setting things up and establishing prices. She was nice, though, and wanted to buy this small potato plant that, although very small, apparently had 2 more days until it matured. Neither of us particularly believed this. While I was trying to see what the price was, she then told me some questions to ask her as it would be helpful next time when I’m trying to sell something. One of the questions were “Do you have food allergies?” or “Do you eat kosher?”; other questions were more personal, like where you are from. I asked if she was allergic to potatoes and she jokingly said “Yes, deathly,” and knowing she was lying, we began bantering. I think I then gave her the plant for free, and then she left.

While setting up, I had to set up an enclosure of cockroaches out of a bag. It was a bag of rice, except it was filled to the brim with larva and then some adults. The adults were escaping during it and it was very gross. It reminded me of a dream that I previously had (no idea if this is true) that I tried to set up a cockroach enclosure, but I was too scared to do it and now I believed I could do it. I didn’t do it.

I was in Japan with a friend and we went out ot eat. My friend was scolded because the last time we went there the food we bought was “too messy” (a donut), but they sold it to us again which was confusing. It wasn’t that what we ate too messy, but the food was too messy. They told us if we were too messy again, we would be banned.

July 21, 2024

This dream is a part of much longer series of dreams that I am not sure I ever actually had. It is a Webcomic that I can only read when I am dreaming. When I was dream journaling within the dream, I used the marker EVE to find to it later. The plot of the Webcomic is as follows.

This guy is investigating this dude in his underground bunker. There’s a computer which was the main attraction. I played three games which this bunker guy invented. The room itself was very small. It had a desk and the computer was not ancient, but it wasn’t ancient by any means. I had a phone on me. I checked through it to see the bunker man’s messages, and he was attracted to this other guy which was the primary plot point. I knew that it would distract me from what I needed to get done within the dream, so I destroyed the phone. The rest of the room was a small bed that was only a mattress, blanket, and pillow, and it did not look comfortable. It was raised high in order to access the underground tunnel hatch underneath the bed. The room was extremely cramped.

The games were all low poly. The first game was there was monsters you had to fight in a raid/wave-like format. I was really bad at it, and recalled that every time I had this dream I was always bad at it.

I don’t recall what the game was, but the third game had me on a train and I had to destroy things but throwing them out of a window on time. The main villains were Ally Beardsley and Chappell Roan. I was joking with them, but they were also trying to kill me. Five of Wands was also there. Before getting on the train, I had to talk to these two trans guys that I was very good friends with. They were also important to the plot. They were friends with each other, but in order to advance the plot I had to misgender them which made me feel very shitty.

I knew what was meant to be done after I completed the games; after all, its what I had to do every time I had the dream. I go under the bed to the secret tunnel, and see a low poly woman working on something. That section of the dream ended there, but I remember being scared upon seeing the woman.

Finding the webcomic creator after episode 130, I went into her DMs to tell her about how much I like the comic. Apparently I had already messaged her a decade earlier to tell her about how much I like this comic and how I can only read it when I’m dreaming.

There was a Chinese woman who lived in the community who did something that made her famous, yet she lived the rest of her life in obscurity. She made food for the community. Her daughter helped out the bunker guy at some point. I just remember that the mom was very important to the plot and the guy’s psyche. I made a promise to the daughter that I would return to China with her once we got our lives sorted; it felt very romantic and like we were in a relationship. While doing this, I was also reading a textbook on facial anatomy. I then dream journaled.

Outside of the webcomic, I could still only think about it. Anyways, I want to this audition for a play which was already a part of a larger existing play I was in with Chappell Roan. We had to sing a song from The Addams Family Musical. The girl next to me had some difficulties in comprehending, which the director explained was the result of her being ESL. In actuality, English was her 7th language. She was originally from Thailand and I knew that she spoke Thai, Cornish, Korean, and Spanish fluently.