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my journal. This works fine if you have lots of free time but with time being a valuable commodity it is
rather inefficient.
Along with the difficulty of balancing your time and determining how organized you need to have your
journal, another problem you will encounter is the simple fact that you have to do a lot of writing which
in itself can become monotonous. The best approach is to recall all that you can in your head before
writing anything, but even so you probably will remember more as you are writing. By recording your
dreams only on the right-hand pages of the journal, you can write late arriving memories on the left-hand
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The Lucid Dreamer s Manual: From the Basics to Beyond
page and conveniently draw an arrow to the portion of the dream in which it occurred. You can also use
the left-hand pages to draw pictures of any dream objects or maps of the dreamscape. This tip may
require you to buy double the amount of journals, but if you want more organized entries it certainly
works.
If you do choose to use this method, you should use the left-hand pages to record what you did while
awake that day, where you went, who you saw, or any other details of your day. Whether you use the
left/right page method or not, you should include this daily information somewhere in your journal,
preferably on the same page as your dream entries. This can be very helpful when you are looking for
patterns in your dreams. For example, I have found that I will often dream about things I have seen or
experienced from two days before or two days after the dream. If I watched a program about natural
disasters on Monday, I would not be surprised if I dreamed about it on Wednesday. If I dream about a
person who I have not heard from in a while, they will usually call me two days later. I don t know why
it happens, but by analyzing my dreams and the journal entries of what I did for the day, I have found
this to be one of my dream patterns.
Many people recommend using a Dictaphone to record your dreams. Upon awakening you can just speak
your dreams aloud into the recorder, and enter them into your journal later. I ve tried this method and
found that for me this is not the way to go. It is not very time efficient. It certainly is easier to record
them verbally, but the problem comes when you are transcribing these tapes. It takes far too long to listen
to these recordings and write them down in your journal. Also, you still have the problem of trying to
keep the dream s sequencing in order and this becomes even more troublesome when using a Dictaphone
or tape recorder.
There are many different styles of journal keeping and everyone may have a natural preference, but if
you want to save some time and you have access to a computer then you may be in luck.. Learning
mostly through trial and error, I have developed an extremely easy and efficient method. Prompted by the
idea of how wonderful it would be if my Dictaphone could write up my journal entries for me, I
employed the help of my personal computer. There are many reasonably priced speech to text
recognition programs available for most home computers. I purchased a program called IBM ViaVoice98
for around fifty dollars. After installing and setting up the program, it will convert what you say directly
into text on your computer screen. You can speak at a normal pace and it does all the typing for you.
Most importantly, you can use it directly with Microsoft Word, a common word processing program.
This allows you to dictate directly into the word processor and when you are done you can save it as a
file and store it in your new computerized dream journal.
The speech to text program is by no means flawless, but it works just fine for a dream journal. It may
make an occasion error but the journal entries as a whole are relatively legible and the time saved is
enormous. Having a few jumbled words here and there is much easier to correct than doing everything by
hand. It completely removes the burden of writing down your dreams, and it totally solves the problem of
jumbled dream sequences because you can cut and paste any misplaced dream fragments into the
appropriate places. If you have the resources, this is by far the easiest and most efficient way of keeping
a dream journal.
There is also a wide variety of dream journal software available on the Internet and possibly at your local
computer store. Two of the better programs available are Awaken98 by Awake-software.com and
Alchera Suite 3 by Mythwell.com. They are reasonably priced between thirty to forty dollars depending
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The Lucid Dreamer s Manual: From the Basics to Beyond
on the program. These programs can be extremely useful for keeping an organized journal, analyzing
your dreams, and cross-referencing past dreams. They have features that allow you to search your journal
for particular words. For example, if you were interested in examining any dreams with beaches in them,
you could search your entire journal for a keyword like "beach", and the program would scan and
retrieve any dream entries that contain the keywords. This can be an extremely efficient way of analyzing
your dream patterns. They even contain a feature that allows you to look up the meaning of particular
dream images by using a built-in dream dictionary. As you become more familiar with your own dream
symbolism, you can even personalize the definitions to reflect your own specific meanings.
The wonders of modern technology are beginning to put an end to the paper-based journal. With all the
benefits of dream journal software it definitely seems to be the way to go, but there is one problem. I
have not found any programs that have integrated the speech to text capability. Since this speech to text
method outperforms any other methods I have found thus far, the best way to overcome this problem is
to use a dream journal program that can import text like Awaken98. This way you can take advantage of
the both benefits. You can journalize your dreams with a speech to text program using your word
processor and then copy and paste the text into the dream journal program. Again, if you have access to a
computer you should seriously consider incorporating it into your dreaming regime, and if you don t
have a computer, you may now have a need for one.
Step Four) Becoming familiar with your Dreams
As your dream journal grows and your dream recall increases, naturally you will become more familiar
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