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The Ink & Paper Dream Journal

© Lauri Jean Crowe

In choosing what medium you will use to keep the pages of your dream journal, what typically comes to mind are paper and pen. These are traditional, handy, portable and don't require much investment. You can pick up a spiral notebook at any supermarket or drugstore for under $1.50, if you don't have one lying around. Banks, as well as other businesses tend to give out free pens as promotional items. So, you could get started for next to nothing. But why not create a dream journal that will both please your personal aesthetic, keep you to the discipline of jotting dreams, and add meaning to your intent to keep a dream journal?

Pen and paper are optimal creative choices because they allow you a direct connection between mind and body that you can feel. Writing is a physical act. With each penstroke, each mark to paper you have physically manifested something that previously existed only for you, only in your mind. You have given the abstract and illusive a more concrete and tactile face, which is what keeping a dream journal does.

Often people say they wish they could have a direct feed to their brains. They say they can't write fast enough. While modern technology may one day achieve this biotechnical link to our thoughts and publication of them, we must work within our current limitations, and optimize them so that they become freedoms rather than tethers. This can be achieved through the simple choice of paper and ink.

Perhaps parchment appeals to you. Or a fine vellum paper. Maybe you just prefer good old yellow legal pads. What you need to keep in mind is that the pen and paper will be working together, just as your body and mind are. You also need to remember that those first jottings need not be your final product.

As dreams are fleeting images most of the time, and you are trying to capture them when you awaken, four things are of prime importance: speed, ease, practicality and availability.

Choosing a beautiful antique inkwell and red ink may be just what you're looking for aesthetically, but if you try to use the quill pen on regular drawing paper it will get hung up, pick up pulp fibers and ultimately slow you down. If you choose japanese washi paper or parchment, the effect may be beautiful, but you may miss out on recalling a dream image in your journal because you have to wait for the ink to dry before flipping the page in your journal.

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