Dream journals don’t really work. I’m sure if you’ve tried keeping one you’ve had similar frustrations: waking up from a vivid dream, scrambling to use a pen and paper to write down the dream, and before you know it half of the memory has dissolved. Sometimes, dreams are incredibly vivid and detailed, and your hands can’t write fast enough to recall what your brain remembers. This is frustrating.

Fortunately, technology has caught up with our brains. Voice transcription has changed the game when it comes to dream recording. This, along with utilizing AI to detect patterns and themes across dreams, unlocks insights that would normally take considerably more effort and time.

In this article, I’m going to detail my method for Dream Journal 2.0, a system anyone can use to record, analyze, and track their dreams. Just like any skill, dream recollection is something you get better at. By utilizing this system, you’ll find that you begin to remember more and more, and may even find yourself excited to wake up in the morning.

Why Dream Journals Suck

I’ve been tracking my dreams on and off for years. Back in 2021, I began having a series of very odd dreams. At first, I did what everyone says to do: keep a small journal by your bed, and when you wake up write down what you dreamt.

The problem with this system is it is too slow and cumbersome. I wanted to record at the speed of my verbalized thoughts. So, I began to use Google Recorder, an Android-native audio-recorder that doubles as a speech-to-text transcriber. When I began this process, language models were in their infancy, with GPT-2 being barely usable.

So, while I was recording my dreams and keeping the transcripts, I wasn’t doing anything with them. Occasionally I would listen to the dreams, but that’s about it. I didn’t have a system for analyzing or documenting them. While this might not matter to some people, it began to matter to me. I was having vivid and bizarre dreams every night, and I wanted to know what they meant.

At first, this amounted to manually listening to the dreams, writing down themes that I personally detected, and seeing what these patterns might mean when viewed from a Freudian or Jungian lens. This was fine, but it was tedious, and my ability to analyze my dreams was limited to my knowledge of psychoanalysis. It quickly became something that was too time-consuming to be actively invested in mentally.

So, I spent the next couple of years recording my dreams in spurts. Sometimes I would go months at a time without recording them, but I’d often have months where every single night I would have a strange dream. Again, I wanted to do something with the transcriptions, but work and life got in the way of spending all of my free time analyzing my dreams.

The System That Works

Love them or hate them, language models have made it easier to take gobs of text and make some sense of the messiness. Once GPT-3 landed in late 2022, it seemed like the perfect tool to analyze the mass of transcribed text I had from years of my dreams. But, it wasn’t.

With the introduction of 4o and longer context windows with persistent memory, ChatGPT has slowly morphed into a better and better tool that understands you. The depth might be debated, but its usefulness has most certainly expanded.

With ChatGPT’s memory being much better as of this year, projects you build with custom instructions are much more useful. The system can remember what you’ve talked about in the past. This is incredibly useful for dream analysis!

By creating a Dream Analysis project, you can provide ChatGPT with custom instructions to take your dream audio transcriptions and view them under multiple lenses. It can categorize your dreams, consider underlying emotional tones, symbols, and build a simple narrative story around your transcription.

After the narrative has been constructed, the system can easily apply symbolic and psychological analysis to the dream, consider personal aspects as they relate to your waking life, and connect the dream to other patterns or themes it has seen with previous dreams.

Now, not only do you have an organized narrative of your dream, but you also have analysis that is as deep as you’d like it to go. This is great as a starting point if you’d like to more seriously analyze your subconscious. Yes, LLMs are not perfect, but they do a great job of applying themes from dreams to various frameworks used for dream analysis.

Storing Your Dreams for Later

Once you’ve spoken, transcribed, and analyzed your dreams, it is time to store them. While the current iteration of 4o’s Projects functionality allows for persistent memory, it isn’t a database. This is where Notion comes in.

Notion is a great solution for small databases of information. You can easily tag and organize your dreams. This system allows you to organize dreams by themes, emotional tones, dream types, lucidity, symbols, intensity, emotional charge, and (my favorite category I made) weirdness.

Each dream is its own page, and that page contains the raw transcript, tags, dream narrative, symbolic and cognitive analysis, and relates it to previous connected dreams. The more dreams you add to your system, the more patterns emerge.

As an added bonus, once you’ve documented all of your dreams in Notion, you can use Notion AI to analyze the entire database. This is technically possible by exporting via markdown and having ChatGPT read everything, but Notion does a pretty good job. In time, it will be even better.

So, the process looks like this:

By keeping the raw transcripts and audio files (stored in Google Recorder or uploaded directly to Notion) you can ensure the original info stays intact. In time, LLMs and these tools will be better, and will provide for a better analysis. If it is decent today, it will be drastically better and more fluid in a few years.

What I’ve Learned

The whole point of doing this is to more deeply understand the subconscious. After all, if I went through all this effort and learned nothing, why bother?

Turns out, after analyzing every dream I recorded over the last year, many patterns emerged. Many are very personal, but I found the insights fascinating.

Here are a few that I’m willing to share:

Recurring Psychological & Symbolic Patterns

1. Architecture as Psyche: Mansions, Schools, Hotels, and Labyrinths

• Symbolism: These structures often stand in for the self or psyche (Jungian “house as self” archetype). Multi-roomed, confusing, or expansive spaces signal exploration of inner dimensions or fragmentation of identity.

• Where it shows up: Gothic mansions, arcades, hybrid school-homes, endless malls, multi-story hotels.

• What it suggests: You're continually searching through layers of self—trying to locate your role, reclaim space, or assert control in an identity that may feel fractured or in flux.

2. Authority Figures, Teachers, and Public Performance

• Symbolism: Professors, performance anxiety, or institutional settings reflect inner judgment, imposter syndrome, or unresolved issues with hierarchy and self-worth.

• Frequent motifs: Short professor with amplified voice, missed bus stops, gigs with missing adapters, chaotic field trips.

• Psych insight: Suggests a drive to prove yourself, combined with fears of not being prepared or not being “enough” in public/professional roles—mirroring themes from waking life around achievement and self-doubt.

3. Vehicles and Travel as Life Direction

• Symbolism: Cars, buses, airports, and missed connections typically symbolize your trajectory, autonomy, or lack thereof.

• Frequent patterns: Being a passenger vs. driver, delayed departures, accidents, backtracking, shortcuts.

• Interpretation: A subconscious narrative of trying to “get somewhere” in life but encountering detours, uncertainty, or questions about control. Often echoes your real-life transitions, job instability, and shifting life direction.

4. Visitors and Crowds: Interruption, Identity, and Belonging

• Themes: Uninvited people arriving, chaos in homes, large social gatherings, drug-fueled spaces, people needing favors.

• Jungian layer: These figures can represent disowned or ignored parts of yourself demanding attention (“shadow visitors”).

• Possible reflection: You may feel intruded upon emotionally, or uncertain about boundaries and your place in groups—especially when the world feels too chaotic to manage.

5. Performance Tools and Broken Equipment

• Common images: Adapters, N64 cartridges, stage gear, microphones, clothing rentals.

• Symbolism: Difficulty accessing the right tools to express or define yourself; preparation sabotaged or delayed.

• Deeper layer: Speaks to anxieties about creative potential, fear of being “incomplete,” and the pain of trying to perform before feeling whole.

My dreams have archetypes (the helper, the trickster, authority figures), and often concern identity. Apparently, I have a battle between my controlled ego (organized and high-achieving) and a chaotic shadow (the opposite). The dreams I tend to record are rarely peaceful, and are often anxious, chaotic, and charged with frustration.

Meta-themes that exist across my dreams include disorientation, interrupted plans, boundary violations, failures to launch, and identity.

Lastly, my dreamscapes are often a mirror maze, that serve to show the many selves I’ve cycled through as I navigate being myself. The motif of a maze or labyrinth is constant, and I’d say I probably have a dream involving a maze at least once a month.

Final Thoughts

Everyone dreams, but not everyone remembers. If you asked me to recall specific dreams from years ago, there’s no way I could without having written them down. I’m glad I took the time over the last 4 years to do this, otherwise I wouldn’t have the insights I do now.

When I started doing this, my ability to recall dreams was poor. Audio recording would typically last a couple of minutes before I’d forget. Now, I can speak for 8 minutes or longer, describing in detail the world my mind creates when I’m unconscious.

If you found this interesting and want to use my templates and layout, I’ve documented everything. This includes specifics on how to set up Notion and the ChatGPT project. Restack this article, drop a comment, or shoot me a message if you want the templates.

Thanks for reading. I hope you have a wild dream tonight.

- Chris