Why I traded in my morning pages for a dream journal

It started with signing up for a course based on Writing Down the Bones. That's where I learned of the freewriting practice, putting pen to paper for a certain period of time, not stopping to review or correct.

I like to write. I prefer writing well - but I liked the discipline and freedom of freewriting. Discipline: don't edit. Freedom: no edits.

The Artist's Way and Bird by Bird also found their way into my hands. I started Morning Pages, adding the discipline of an early start time to my practice. I discovered certain writing methods have demonstrable healing effects.

But I got tired of applying discipline with no tangible goal. My pages were dreck. That was okay, but it was also not okay. (Can I write something other than dreck?) I got lazy, laying the same narrative onto different prompts. I got sick of reciting the contents of my refrigerator and writing "I can't think of anything more to write." and "I'm bored with this."

Someone creative, learned, and wise invited me to apply to join her selective dream circle: "You're creative and quick, you'd like this." Guess she knew that creative people tend to dream.

I joined and learned that keeping a dream journal was good practice, as it lets you witness how your dreams are consistent, or change, over time. It was easy for me to narrate what came to me during the night, easier than writing for the sake of strengthening my writing muscle. It was almost as if some inner playwright, with a better sense of the dramatic than I have in waking life, was doing the grunt work for me, and keeping me entertained.

The dreams that come - and they seemed to come more, now that I was paying attention - continue to interest me enough to keep writing them down. My dreams are not really bizarre, though sometimes they include strange details or novel objects, and not often epic. But there are interesting emotions that arise in the dream scenes - uneasiness, anger, elation, wistfulness - and some version of me is present, as observer or character, in a scene just "off " enough to make me curious: What did I do that for? I wouldn't do that in waking life!"

The Morning Pages went by the wayside - now I just write out my dreams as I recall them - and fold in any work done with the dream material.

The freewriting practice, though, still holds. Putting pen to paper without stopping to review or correct seems to help the dream material travel more easily from the ethereal to the everyday.