Starting a Dreamwork Practice: A Beginner's Guide

You don’t need training to start working with your dreams. You don’t need to have read Jung. You don’t even need to remember your dreams yet.

You just need a notebook and some honesty.

Put the notebook by your bed. When you wake up—and I mean the second you wake up, before your phone, before coffee, before you even think about the day—write down whatever’s there. A scene. A feeling. A color. Half a sentence. It doesn’t matter if it makes no sense. Just capture it.

If you wake up blank, don’t move. Stay in the same position and ask yourself, “What was I just experiencing?” Something usually surfaces—a mood, an image, a fragment. Write that down. Even “I felt anxious but don’t know why” is something to work with.

Most people think they don’t dream. They do. Everyone does. They just haven’t trained themselves to remember. The act of writing tells your psyche you’re paying attention, and paying attention is all it takes. Give it a week or two. Your recall will improve.

Once you’ve got some dreams recorded, look for what repeats. Not the stories—the feelings. Which emotions keep showing up? What symbols appear again and again? What situations from your waking life might the dream be commenting on?

And here’s the most important thing: you’re the authority on your own dreams. Dream dictionaries are mostly garbage. Your unconscious isn’t speaking in a universal code. It’s speaking in your language—your memories, your associations, your life. The meaning that matters is the one that lands in your gut, not the one some book tells you is correct.

Start there. See what happens.