Dream Journal Printables & More— Blank page syndrome. You’ve experienced this before when you sit down to write and suddenly your mind clears of everything creative and goes as blank as the page before you.
Don’t stress; every writer has dealt with this before and it doesn’t mean that you’re any less creative than the great writers of the world. The important thing is how you deal with hitting a wall.
While some writers are famous for insisting you trudge through it, you can also take a walk, drink some tea, or read for inspiration. But if even these standard methods aren’t cutting it or you want help improving your creativity overall, there is still a great technique out there for coming up with creative ideas.
How Dream Journaling Improves Creativity
Dream journaling is a wonderful way to actively improve your creativity. There have been multiple studies that show a link between dreams and creativity. Scientists theorize that this is because dreams are a way for our brains to process, store, and make connections between ideas. Making new connections between disparate ideas is essentially the basis for creativity. Whether you’re a poet finding the perfect metaphor or a scientist solving a problem using old methods in a new way, creativity relies on making connections. Dreaming is to creatives as times tables are to mathematicians. It’s essential.
Dream Journaling Prompts
Upon first waking up, use these dream writing and artistic prompts to record your dreams and strengthen your creativity.
Dream Writing Prompts
- Write a short dialogue based on your dream.
- Write a short about what happens next in the dream.
- Describe a character or location from your dream.
- Describe the main emotion of your dream.
Dream Prompts for Artists
- Draw or paint a character or location from your dream.
- Draw or paint something that only existed in the world of your dream.
- Convey the main emotion of your dream with only one image
- Show what happened using only images
Dream Journaling Free Printables
Why Dream Journaling?
So why write your dreams down, if having them are enough? Increasing the number of dreams you remember and mentally assigning importance to them helps strengthen those pathways that drive creativity in your brain.
You see, your mind is a very suggestible thing. By writing your dreams down, or even speaking them aloud to someone, you encourage your subconscious to dream more and save more of those dreams to your permanent memory. This, in turn, strengthens those processes that connect different ideas to forge new ones.
Writing in your dream journal every day may sound intimidating, but it is easy once you get into the habit of it. Simply keep a notebook or papers by your bed and write down everything you remember as soon as you wake up.
Note the emotions, intriguing scenarios, and any snippets of dialogue you might remember. Not only will journaling each morning help your overall creativity, but the notes on your dreams can become a great resource for unique ideas in the future.
For example, with a dream journal on hand, the next time you find yourself staring at a blank page with nothing to write, you can go back through your dreams and expand upon a striking plot or character, or write the next few lines of an interrupted dream.
With your dreams recorded in one place, you may realize certain themes and emotions keep popping up. This insight into where your mind goes when asleep can help you uncover new aspects of yourself or motivations for self-reflection.
More Dream Journaling Free Printables
These free dream journal templates are compliments of Sleep Advisor. They were designed with creatives in mind to help you mine your dreams for your most creative ideas.
Dream Journaling & Kids
Exploring our dreams, fantasies, and ambitions through journaling has a positive effect on our self-esteem and confidence. Our dreams and fantasies can tell us a lot about ourselves and also help us develop our ambitions. And, our ambitions lead us to set goals in order to accomplish them.
Dreams are a sequence of images, and sometimes sounds, we experience when we are sleeping. Sleep dreams generally have an emotional basis for them. Sometimes dreams appear for no apparent reason, while other dreams are our brain’s way of processing real-time events of our life experiences, especially those that are highly emotional.
A child can sometimes use their dreams as a tool for their personal development and problem-solving. That is, if your pre-teen pays attention to them by writing them in their journals. The more detailed your preteen can be when writing out their dreams, the more insight they might gain. Another type of dream that can be useful to write in our journals is our daydreams.
We may not understand them at first but if they are noted down in our journals we can go back and interpret them later and maybe gain some insight. Unlocking another piece of the puzzle of ourselves in this way increases our confidence.
We generally use fantasies to escape reality for one reason or another. Your child might fantasize about being the best football player, the best singer, or a fireman. Everyone fantasizes about something. It’s something human beings do and is one reason — really a resource — why we have advanced so much.
Fantasies help us imagine the unimaginable. They help us reach beyond ourselves and think of the possibilities. Our dreams are often unimpeded by doubts and detractors, so they give us the confidence to go for what we dream.
Both dreams and fantasies, as you might conclude, are what, in part, inspire our ambitions. And it’s our ambitions that lead us to set goals for our life. Now, aside from the development of our ambitions, dream journaling, as some would call it, can be a fun and insightful way to get to know more about ourselves. It’s another resource for defining who we are. The pre-teen who is interested in getting to know themselves more should record both their dreams and fantasies in their journal. Clarity of oneself will affect one’s self-esteem and confidence in a positive way.
We already know that our dreams and fantasies help us create our ambitions. Our ambitions are our desire to have some object, possession, or anything else that the obtainment of moves us forward and toward it in our life journey. More specifically speaking, ambition is a strong desire. It’s strong enough to move us into some form of action. If it’s not strong enough to move you into some form of action then the ambition remains a dream or fantasy.
Your tween’s ambitions can be almost anything they might imagine. The important thing is to encourage them to write about them in their journals and track their growth and development wherever they may go. It’s not about realizing the fruition of those ambitions, but more about your pre-teen defining themselves and the direction they want their lives to go.
This is where your child will receive positive effects on their confidence and self-esteem, and have a positive relationship with themselves, feeling they have the power to guide their futures.
Until next time, dream journal on…
If you enjoyed these Dream Journal Benefits and Free Printables, please share them on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Pinterest. I appreciate it!
Sincerely,
Journal Buddies Jill
journalbuddies.com
creator and curator
