The Ultimate Guide to Dream Tracking
Illuminating the hidden patterns of your unconscious mind
Welcome to the ultimate guide to dream tracking—a comprehensive, step-by-step approach to understanding your dreams, uncovering hidden patterns, and fostering personal growth. Whether you're new to dream journaling or seeking to deepen your practice, this guide will help you master the art of dream tracking.
Why Dream Journaling Works: The Jungian Approach as a Gateway to Your Subconscious
The Jungian method of analytical psychology incorporates direct feedback from dreams, seeing them as a gateway to the subconscious. This gateway provides a peephole to the raw unconscious material of your psyche, and by interpreting the symbols that come up out of it, insights can be constant and abundant.
Tackling the subconscious can be tricky. I have found the most difficult part of interpreting one's dreams is that, without aid, it requires a lot of time and practice, and often seeking a professional Jungian Analyst can be expensive.
For these very reasons I have created an easy to use Notion Dream Tracking Template (which can be replicated on paper for those more inclined), and a handy Dream Tracking Guide, to help you along with the valuable process.
In the long term, tracking your dreams can:
Reveal recurring themes, symbols, and patterns
Enhance self-awareness and emotional intelligence
Support personal growth and individuation
Uncover hidden desires, fears, and unresolved conflicts
Spark creativity and problem-solving abilities
Step 1: Tips for Remembering Your Dreams
Set an Intention: Before sleep, set a clear intention to remember your dreams. A simple phrase like "I will remember my dreams" can program your mind to make recall easier.
Create a Dream-Conducive Environment:
Keep your bedroom calm, dark, and quiet.
Avoid screens and heavy stimulation before bed.
Place your journal or dream tracking app within arm's reach.
Read Fiction Before Bed: Reading a bit of fiction before bed primes your mind with narrative, and allows your brain to wander into an imaginative state. I find this helps to induce more vivid dreams that can be remembered more easily.
Step 2: Recording Your Dreams
Wake Gently: Upon waking, remain still with your eyes closed. Let your mind drift back to your dreams.
Capture Immediately: Once you have it, write down or record your dreams as soon as you wake. Personally I like to fill out a notes tab on my phone, or use a voice recording app which will transcribe my sleepy mumblings into words. Focus on:
Key symbols, images, and emotions
Characters, settings, and dialogues
Sensory details (sounds, colours, feelings)
Enter the (Important) Boring Bits: After you have got the dream down, you can then fill in the date, and include a brief journal entry describing your actions and feelings from the day before, this may be useful for correlating patterns in your dreams.
Step 3: Analyse Your Dreams
Now that you have your raw dream material, this is where the Dream Tracking Guide comes into its own. Simply click the button that says ‘I’ve had a dream and I’d like your help analysing it’, and it will prompt you to input the dream into the chat. The GPT will then guide you through the rest, prompting you on your thoughts and feelings over what came up for you in your dream state.
The GPT has been trained on Jungian literature, and will give its responses under strict instruction to respond as an analyst would, prompting you so that it can give you the most personalised and constructive response possible.
The structure that it will guide you through requires three inputs:
Input 1. For your first input, please provide the GPT your raw dream material, in first person, exactly how you dreamt it. The GPT will pick out the dream symbols for you, and it will ask you for your associations.
Input 2. For each symbol, provide the GPT with four or five associations, the first things you think of when thinking about the symbol in question. If the feeling or thought that comes up is better expressed in a sentence or two, that is fine also.
How you really know that you're on the right lines is that if the association ‘clicks’ with the symbol. It's hard to comprehend how this click occurs or what drives it, but it is a real feeling and can be harnessed to great effect. If you have an association that clicks, only enter that association for the symbol and disregard the rest.
Input 3. Once you have given it your associations, the GPT will prompt you for your Inner Dynamics. Given the symbols and the associations you have presented, how do these relate with the inner dynamics of your life right now?
Spend some time thinking about how these themes may correlate with the ins and outs of your life and input those into the GPT. It can be a ramble or a rant if you like, as much detail as you can fit in.
Example
I will now provide an example of symbols, associations, and inner dynamics so the framework is easier to follow (there is also another completed example in the Notion Template):
Dream: You’re climbing a steep familiar mountain but keep slipping.
Symbol: Mountain – Generically represents ambition, struggles, or spiritual ascent.
Associations: Personally, the mountain may be one you are familiar with, perhaps you went on holiday to this specific mountain with your family lots when you were younger, and so you may associate it with family, happiness, childhood, safety.
Inner Dynamic: Perhaps you may relate the slipping in this dream to an inner resistance that is present in your life, like contacting your family for example. Maybe you are feeling like it is an uphill battle to contact them of late (this is exactly the type of phraseology that dreams love to capitalise on sometimes).
So, one may find that this dream is pointing to the fact that the dreamer should probably connect to their loved ones, or at least find a way of communication that feels less difficult to maintain.
The above example is precisely why Jungian Dream dictionaries cannot be effective. Symbols are so personal to the individual, that they could be indicating something very different to what would normally be associated with a mountain, for example.
Interpretation: After you have given the GPT your inner dynamics for each symbol, it will then provide you with a detailed interpretation. This, I find, is where the GPT is super effective.
It is often difficult to follow the unintuitive train of symbols, how they relate to each other and stack into a meaningful interpretation, but what the GPT does so well is follow lines of logic that humans may get stuck on. I find it often presents to you a very well structured interpretation given the chaotic mix of data you presented it with.
Use this interpretation given by the GPT to hone in on what exactly the dream was trying to get across to you, or if not exactly just the general theme.
Rituals: Finally, as a sort of response to the message, the GPT will offer some rituals that you may like to undertake in your waking life.
For example, the dreamer of the dream above may initiate contact with a loved one as their ritual for the dream. These rituals are a great sign of commitment to the dream interpretation process, and often have spooky consequences.
After the GPT gives you the interpretation and rituals, if you ask it for a summary it will give you a nice copy and pasteable segment that you can input into your Notion Database.
*This is a gentle reminder that there are limitations to the ChatGPT tool. What it gives to you should always be used as advice and never treated as matter as fact. It is good practice to write your own interpretation before it gives you its version. Sit with whatever information it gives to you and decide for yourself whether it resonates with the true frequency of the dream. Also, I think it is a great idea to come up with your own rituals, and just use the ones it gives you as recommendations.
Step 4: Storage
Now that you have your completed interpretation, you are ready to store it away for later. For this, I think Notion is the best tool for the job. Notion provides an easy and intuitive database set up, and you can store a lot of data on there for free.
Having a good stack of dreams over a long period of time can provide the user with tonnes of data which can be then re-analysed by GPT to pick up patterns and trends in personal growth over time, and this is precisely what we will be exploring.
Simply click the ‘New’ button and pick a title for your dream. Then input the date, the Dream Interpretation Summary, Happenings From the Day Before, Symbol Tags (enter these as concise symbol names e.g. ‘Mountain’, ‘Slipping’.), and Emotional Charge. If you feel confident that there was some archetypal symbolism in the dream (e.g. Shadow, Anima, The Great Mother) then input those as well.
And that's it! Sure, it may take a few goes to get the hang of the process, but it's definitely the most streamlined way that I can think of that captures the essence of interpreting one's dreams, and I can tell you from experience that it is a potent catalyst for growth.
Conclusion
Dream tracking is not just about keeping a record of your dreams—it's a journey into the Self. Through consistent practice, reflection, and analysis, you can uncover profound insights, foster personal transformation, and connect with the deeper layers of your psyche.
Begin your dream tracking journey, and let your inner world illuminate your path.
References and Resources
Jung, C.G. Man and His Symbols
Johnson, Robert A. Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth
Connect to Talk About Dreams
Disclaimer: This guide is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for professional psychological advice. Always consult a qualified mental health professional for serious psychological concerns.