Why I keep a dream journal
When I tell people I’ve been doing dreamwork for decades, they sometimes ask why I keep a dream journal. Here’s one small story that illustrates what I love about it. I’ve been keeping a dream journal since the early 1990s when a series of mysterious dreams and events led to me to start gathering evidence for my mystic detective work. At that time, I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with the dreams I collected.
I’ve kept dreams scribbled in notebooks, binders, and more recently on my computer. While tidying my office this past week, I stopped to check if a notebook was blank or full. I flipped it open and discovered it was a travel journal I had kept during a family vacation to Santiago de Cuba. The date was March 11, 2009. My children were young and it was March break. We wanted a beach getaway to a place that would have good music nearby.
Feeling a bit nostalgic now, I randomly reached up for one of the dream journals I’d just placed on a high shelf. I landed on a dream journal entry from February 11, 1996. Michel and I were living in Paris and pondering our future a lot, the possibility of starting a family, those kinds of things. The journal entry reads “yesterday in my dream I was made to remember the words “chang chang”.
Was it exactly that, chang chang? Or was it chan chan? What did I make of those instructions? Did I find it sinister or random, a name or phrase from another language? At that point I hadn’t learned how to work with my dreams creatively so it was noted as an instruction and nothing more. Remember this.
And, speaking of remembering, with these two journal entries juxtaposed against one another in this current moment, a song popped into my head. I remembered that in March 2009, during our trip to Santiago de Cuba, the soundtrack of our trip, the song we requested the most, was the great Cuban song by Compay de Segundo entitled … Chan Chan!
Don’t I have video of my children singing along with this song? Ah yes, found it easily, two happy boys on my parents’ laps, singing Chan Chan! triumphantly, fourteen years after I was told to remember the title (Chan Chan starts at 1:31). My younger self, questioning the future in Paris, would have been comforted to know I’d be singing and dancing with our two children soon enough.
And here I am, about eight years after we all sang it together, finally putting two and two together. I’m not entirely sure why the puzzle pieces have fallen into place right at this moment. Perhaps it is because I was thinking of a question my dreaming friend Maureen asked me earlier this week. She asked how we feel about those voices that tell us things as we wake or all asleep. This synchronicity between journal entries seems to reply, look, it’s fine, it was intended to be helpful even if it took a few decades for her to get the message.
What kinds of folds of time are we dancing in? Such is the magic of dreaming and dream journaling, breathing poetry into our lives everyday. To cap it off, another dreaming friend, Barbara, pointed out to me that the song Chan Chan is also from a dream. Wiki quotes Compay Segundo as saying “I didn’t compose Chan Chan, I dreamt it. I dream of music. I sometimes wake up with a melody in my head, I hear the instruments, all very clear.” All the more reason to take our dreams, full of song and music, story and poetry, and bring them with us into waking life.
*A version of this blog post is published in DreamTime, Spring 2017 issue, the magazine for the International Association for the Study of Dreams and you can read the pdf here.