{"id":5430,"date":"2013-01-24T22:30:14","date_gmt":"2013-01-25T03:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/dreamgates\/?p=5430"},"modified":"2013-01-24T22:30:14","modified_gmt":"2013-01-25T03:30:14","slug":"why-you-want-to-keep-a-journal-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2013\/01\/why-you-want-to-keep-a-journal-2.html","title":{"rendered":"Why you want to keep a journal"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>When a lusty, ambitious young Scot named James Boswell first met\u00a0Dr. Samuel Johnson, Johnson advised him to keep a journal of his life.\u00a0Boswell responded that he was already journaling, recording “all sorts\u00a0of little incidents.” Dr Johnson said, “Sir, there is nothing too little\u00a0for so little a creature as man.”<\/p>\n

Indeed, there is nothing too\u00a0little, or too great, for inclusion in a journal. If you are not already\u00a0keeping one, I entreat you to start\u00a0today.\u00a0<\/em>Write whatever is\u00a0passing through your mind, or whatever catches your eye in the passing\u00a0scene around you. If you remember your dreams, start with them. If you\u00a0don’t recall your dreams, start with whatever thoughts and feelings are\u00a0first with you as you enter the day, or that interval between two sleeps\u00a0the French used to call\u00a0dorveille\u00a0<\/em>(“sleep-wake”), a liminal\u00a0space when creative ideas often stream through.<\/p>\n

If you have any\u00a0hopes of becoming a writer, you’ll find that journaling is your daily\u00a0workout that keeps your writing muscles limber. If you are already a\u00a0writer, you may find that as you set things down just as they come, with\u00a0no concern for editors, critics or consequences, you are releasing\u00a0descriptive scenes, narrative solutions, characters – even entire first\u00a0drafts – quite effortlessly. Some of the most productive writers have\u00a0also been prodigious journal-keepers. Graham Greene started recording\u00a0dreams when he was sixteen, after a breakdown in school. His journals\u00a0from the last quarter-century of his life survive, in the\u00a0all-but-unbreakable code of his difficult handwriting. First and last,\u00a0he recorded his dreams, and – as I describe in detail in my\u00a0Secret History of Dreaming<\/em><\/a>, they gave him plot solutions, character\u00a0development, insights into the nature of reality that he attributed to\u00a0some of his characters, and sometimes bridge scenes that could be\u00a0troweled directly into a narrative. Best of all, journaling\u00a0kept him\u00a0going<\/em>, enabling him to crank out his daily pages for publication\u00a0no matter how many drinks or how much cloak-and-dagger or illicit amour he\u00a0had indulged in the night before.<\/p>\n

You don’t have to be a writer\u00a0to be a journaler, but journal-keeping will make you a writer anyway. In\u00a0the pages of your journal, you will meet yourself, in all your aspects.\u00a0As you keep a journal over the years, you’ll notice the rhymes andloops or cycles in your life.
\nMircea Eliade, the great Romanian-born historian of religions, was a great journaler. In the last volume of his published journals, he reflects, during a visit to Amsterdam\u00a0in 1974, on how a bitter setback to his hopes at the time he first\u00a0visited that city nearly a quarter-century before had driven him to do\u00a0his most enduring work. He had been hoping that his early\u00a0autobiographical novel, published in English as\u00a0Bengal Nights<\/em>,\u00a0would be a big commercial success, enabling him to live as a full-time\u00a0novelist. Sales were disappointing. Had it been otherwise, “I would have\u00a0devoted almost all my time to literature and relegated the history of\u00a0religions to second place, even though\u00a0Shamanism\u00a0<\/em>was at the\u00a0time almost entirely drafted.” The world would have gained a promising,and perhaps eventually first-class, novelist; but we might have lost the\u00a0scholar who first made the study of shamanism academically respectable\u00a0and proceeded to breathe vibrant life, as well as immense erudition,\u00a0into the cross-cultural study of the human interaction with the sacred.<\/p>\n

Synesius\u00a0of Cyrene, a heterodox bishop in North Africa around 400, counseled in a\u00a0wonderful essay\u00a0On Dreams\u00a0<\/em>that we should keep twin journals: a\u00a0journal of the night and a journal of the day. In the night journal, we\u00a0would record dreams as the products of a “personal oracle” and a direct\u00a0line to the God we can talk to. In the day journal, we would track the\u00a0signs and correspondences\u00a0 through which the world around us is\u00a0constantly speaking in a symbolic code. “All things are signs appearing\u00a0through all things. They are brothers in a single living creature, the\u00a0cosmos.” The sage is one who “understands the relationship of the parts\u00a0of the universe” – and we deepen and focus that understanding by\u00a0recording signs in our day journal.<\/p>\n

Partly because I keep unusual\u00a0hours, and am often embarked on my best creative work long before dawn,\u00a0I don’t separate my night journal from my day journal. All the material\u00a0goes into one book – a leather-bound travel journal, when I am on the\u00a0road. I try to type up my entries before my handwriting (as difficult as\u00a0Greene’s) becomes illegible and put the printouts in big ringback\u00a0binders. I save each entry with a date and a title in my data files, so I\u00a0automatically have a running index.<\/p>\n

One of the things you’ll come to see clearly, as you journal dreams over a considerable period of time, is that your dream self travels ahead of your waking self, scouting the ways.<\/p>\n

Of course, there are different modes of journaling. A journal that was used for emotional release and venting – for self-therapy, in fact – in a difficult period may need to be trashed (or better, ritually destroyed) when it has served its purpose. The staple content of my own journals, kept of and on since my teens and with constancy over the past three decades, is reports of dreams (sleeping and waking) that are kept clearly organized, with dates and titles, “bumper stickers” and notes on follow-up events and actions. I suggest the basic layout for a Secret Book of this kind in my book Dreaming True,<\/em> <\/a>and offer many creative games to play with it in my book Active Dreaming<\/em>.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When a lusty, ambitious young Scot named James Boswell first met\u00a0Dr. Samuel Johnson, Johnson advised him to keep a journal of his life.\u00a0Boswell responded that he was already journaling, recording “all sorts\u00a0of little incidents.” Dr Johnson said, “Sir, there is nothing too little\u00a0for so little a creature as man.” Indeed, there is nothing too\u00a0little, or…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":224,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,23,14,27,29,16],"tags":[1570,1567,1569,1568,809],"class_list":["post-5430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creativity","category-dreams-of-the-dead","category-journaling","category-self-help","category-story","category-writing","tag-dr-johnson","tag-graham-greene","tag-journals","tag-mircea-eliade","tag-synesius-of-cyrene"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy you want to keep a journal - Dream Gates<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2013\/01\/why-you-want-to-keep-a-journal-2.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why you want to keep a journal - Dream Gates\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When a lusty, ambitious young Scot named James Boswell first met\u00a0Dr. Samuel Johnson, Johnson advised him to keep a journal of his life.\u00a0Boswell responded that he was already journaling, recording “all sorts\u00a0of little incidents.” Dr Johnson said, “Sir, there is nothing too little\u00a0for so little a creature as man.” Indeed, there is nothing too\u00a0little, or…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2013\/01\/why-you-want-to-keep-a-journal-2.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Dream Gates\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2013-01-25T03:30:14+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/dreamgates\/files\/2013\/01\/journaling1-300x224.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Robert Moss\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Why you want to keep a journal - 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Robert Moss","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/#\/schema\/person\/941740e4115cce34706832d06aa76b6b","name":"Robert Moss","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/777\/7770e3a2cde4458084d9a31237336b92x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/777\/7770e3a2cde4458084d9a31237336b92x96.jpg","caption":"Robert Moss"},"description":"Robert Moss describes himself as a dream teacher, on a path for which there has been no career track in our culture. He is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. Born in Australia, he survived three near-death experiences in childhood. He leads popular seminars all over the world, including a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a best-selling novelist, journalist and independent scholar. His nine books on dreaming, shamanism and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamways of the Iroquois, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, The Three \"\"Only\"\" Things, The Secret History of Dreaming, Dreamgates, Active Dreaming and Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole. His most recent book is The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse. Over the past 20 years, he has led seminars at the Esalen Institute, Kripalu, the Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, Bastyr University, John F. Kennedy University, Meriter Hospital, and many other centers and institutions. He has taught depth workshops in Active Dreaming in the UK, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Brazil and Austria and leads a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. He hosts the \"\"Way of the Dreamer\"\" radio show at www.healthylife.net. He has appeared on many TV and radio shows, ranging from Charlie Rose and the Today show to Coast to Coast and the Diane Rehm show on NPR. His articles on dreaming have been published in media ranging from Parade to Shaman's Drum.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.mossdreams.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/author\/rmoss"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/224"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5430"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5434,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5430\/revisions\/5434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}