{"id":286,"date":"2017-01-27T18:11:29","date_gmt":"2017-01-27T18:11:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nette.ca\/jeannette\/?p=286"},"modified":"2017-05-12T18:38:28","modified_gmt":"2017-05-12T18:38:28","slug":"why-i-keep-a-dream-journal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nette.ca\/jeannette\/2017\/01\/27\/why-i-keep-a-dream-journal\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I keep a dream journal"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Paris, 1996<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\u2019ve 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\u2019t entirely sure what to do with the dreams I collected.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Feeling a bit nostalgic now, I randomly reached up for one of the dream journals I\u2019d 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 \u201cyesterday in my dream I was made to remember the words \u201cchang chang\u201d.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0the great Cuban song by Compay de Segundo entitled … Chan Chan!<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t I have video of my children singing along with this song? Ah yes, found it easily, two happy boys on my parents\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

And here I am, about eight\u00a0years 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.<\/p>\n