“Write a dream journal?” You grin over your morning cup of coffee. “I’m working on a trilogy or a new short story. I don’t have extra time for a new book project that won’t be published.”

But take another look at the idea:

Historically, dreams have been important in many famous lives. From Biblical Joseph to surrealist painter Salvador Dali, images seen within dreams give hints of the future, inspire creativity, and spark inventive ideas.

Would you like to gather a wealth of images, characters, and places that have a personal signature but are deeply mysterious and intriguing to your readers? The answer: use a currency unique to you. Mine your dreams!

Three Ways to Mine Your Dreams for Literary Gold:

Find the Universal Appeal

Our dream imagination is like an unfinished novel. When we dream, we have no real idea whether it will be a nightmare or a pleasant stroll before we start.

So which dreams will interest your readers?

Dreams with an element of mystery and universal appeal.

Recall Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein character dream. Wanting to fix up a boring ghost story, she found her answer in the nightmare–

“I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.'”—Mary Shelley

What is so fascinating about Frankenstein? A truly novel cadaver creation sprang from her nightmare. All of us can relate to horror dreams, and Shelley’s monster seems to have that powerful hypnosis that only the productions of our subconscious can wield to paralyze us and keep us glued to the novel’s pages till the end.

Describe Unique Landscapes 

Were you flying? Falling? Walking through an orchard of fruit trees old as Earth? What about houses, cars, furniture?

Your dreams may not be Spielberg productions, but even a few sentences will serve to keep a sci-fi or fantasy landscape in mind for use in future writing.

List colors and textures: and in dreams, colors often take on unique meaning(more on that below).

Many people have difficulty remembering dreams, so if one wakes you up at 3 a.m., briefly note a few of the main ideas of the dream journey when you can. It helps to keep your journal or laptop on a nightstand close by.

Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote his epic Kubla Khan based on a dream—he even labels the poem, “A vision in a dream, a Fragment.”

“The shadow of the dome of pleasure/Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure/From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device/A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!”

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Record the Meaning

This is the fun part of dream journaling for me!

I once dreamed of a house with 3 levels. On the main level it was a plain mobile home, underneath was a natural rock garage filled with cars, and through a set of wooden doors was an elegant ballroom with a chandelier and a black tie dinner party.

My own interpretation was loosely based on what I thought it meant: three stages in life, or even an inter-dimensional place that was merely a mobile home on the outside. What other unique rooms might we find in this place?

But if you want to put a more conventional meaning to your dreams, visit a dream dictionary site and you’ll find even more ideas about symbols. One of my favorites is Dream Moods.

With a dream journal in your resource stack, you will be armed with unique images, interesting characters, and bizarre worlds to build your fiction, at no cost other than a little catnap!

And you might be surprised at just what does get published from your dream journal.