Dream journal

To keep a dream journal, you need something to write on within reach of your bed, and two or three minutes each morning.

1. Put it by your bed tonight. Use a notebook with a pen on top, or your phone with a note already open. It has to be close enough to reach without getting up.
2. When you wake up, stay still for a moment. Keep your eyes closed and go back over the dream. Do this before you check your phone, talk to anyone, or think about the day.
3. Write the first words that come. Three or four words are enough to hold on to a dream, like “old school, late, the dog”. Write them even if they make no sense.
4. Then write the rest, in any order. Use the four parts in the table below. Do not fix the spelling, and do not try to turn it into a good story.
5. If you remember nothing, write that. “No dream today” is a real entry. So is “I dreamed, but it is gone”. An entry every morning keeps the habit going.

You can also say the dream out loud and record it on your phone. Speaking can be easier than writing when you have just woken up.

A dream journal entry has the date and four parts: what happened, who was there, where it was, and how it felt.

Write what you saw. You do not have to work out what it means. To keep track of how long you sleep, use a sleep diary.

The dream journal example below is one morning’s entry. We made it up for this page. It has the same four parts, and it took about three minutes to write.

The entry has no title, no neat ending, and no guess about what the dream means. It only says what was there.

Research on remembering dreams suggests that on most mornings there is something to write down, and that a dream is easy to lose in the first moments of the day. Here are four findings from two studies.

On most mornings, there is something to write.

In one study, adults recorded what they remembered every morning for about two weeks. On average, they could say what they had dreamed on 58% of their mornings. On 14% they knew they had dreamed but could not say what. On 28% they remembered nothing (Elce and colleagues, 2025).

People remembered more dreams than they had guessed.

Before that study began, the same people guessed how often they remember a dream. Their guesses came to fewer than three mornings a week. When they recorded every morning, they had a dream to report on about 5 mornings a week. The study cannot say whether recording made them remember more, or whether their guesses were too low.

A dream may be lost when something else takes your attention.

In the same study, everyone took a short test of how easily they get distracted. People who got distracted easily had more mornings when they knew they had dreamed but could not say what the dream was. The researchers think a dream stays with you only until something else takes your attention, like an alarm, someone talking, or thoughts about the day. That is why you stay still and go back over the dream before you do anything else.

People who remember many dreams may be awake a little longer at night.

In one small study, people slept for a night in a sleep lab. Those who usually remembered their dreams were awake for about 30 minutes during the night. Those who almost never remembered them were awake for about 14 (Ruby and colleagues, 2013). So if you remember few dreams, it may only mean that you wake up less. Do not wake yourself up on purpose to remember more.

The findings on this page link to the two studies below. We read the full text of both for this page. The steps and the example entry are our own.

1. Elce, V., Bergamo, D., Bontempi, G., Pedreschi, B., Bellesi, M., Handjaras, G. and Bernardi, G. (2025). The individual determinants of morning dream recall. Communications Psychology, 3, 25.
2. Ruby, P., Blochet, C., Eichenlaub, J.-B., Bertrand, O., Morlet, D. and Bidet-Caulet, A. (2013). Alpha reactivity to first names differs in subjects with high and low dream recall frequency. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 419.