Starting a Dreamwork Practice: A Beginner's Guide

I’d been lucid dreaming since high school. Knew I was dreaming while I was dreaming, could steer the thing like a go-kart if I wanted to. I thought that made me good at this.

But I’d never written a single dream down.

When I started my training at the Institute for Dream Studies, the first assignment was simple: put a notebook by your bed. Write whatever you remember when you wake up. That’s it. I grabbed a cheap spiral-bound from the kitchen drawer, set it on my nightstand, and figured I’d have this handled.

The first morning I actually did it, I was stunned. Not by anything dramatic; the dream was mundane. Something about reorganizing a closet that kept getting deeper the more I cleaned it. But seeing my own handwriting describe something my conscious mind had zero memory of deciding to create? That messed with me. I’d been inside dreams for years but never looked at one from the outside. It’s the difference between swimming in a river and standing on the bank watching where it flows.

The Notebook Is the Whole Practice

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.

Here’s what I tell people who say they’re “not dream people”: your unconscious doesn’t care about your identity as a dreamer. It’s producing this material every single night whether you show up for it or not. The notebook is just you finally pulling up a chair.

One more thing about the notebook: date your entries. Every single one. You’ll be shocked how often a dream from Tuesday connects to something that happens on Thursday. Or you’ll flip back six months later and find a dream that was clearly commenting on something you couldn’t see at the time. Without dates, your dream journal is a pile of loose pages. With dates, it’s a map.

What to Do Once You’ve Got Material

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?

Don’t analyze right away. Sit with the images first. Let them be weird. A dream about your dead grandmother serving pancakes at a gas station doesn’t need to make logical sense. It needs to make felt sense. Something in that image is charged, and your job is to notice which part makes your stomach tighten or your eyes well up.

Ask the image questions. Not “what does this mean?” but “what do you want me to know?” Talk to the dream figures like they’re real, because inside your psyche, they are. The first time a dream figure answers back with something you didn’t expect, you’ll understand why. That’s active imagination, and it’s one of the most powerful tools in Jungian dreamwork.

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.

That closet dream I mentioned? Took me three days to realize the closet was my own psyche. The deeper I cleaned, the more I found. Not because the closet was messy, but because there was more in there than I’d bothered to look at.

Start there. See what happens. What showed up last night that you almost let dissolve?