If you have any hopes of becoming a writer, you’ll find that journaling is your daily workout that keeps your writing muscles limber. If you are already a writer, you may find that as you set things down just as they come, with no concern for editors, critics, or consequences, you are releasing descriptive scenes, narrative solutions, characters — even entire first drafts — effortlessly.
Some of the most productive writers have also been prodigious journal keepers. Graham Greene started recording dreams when he was sixteen, after a breakdown in school. His journals from the last quarter century of his life survive in the all-but-unbreakable code of his difficult handwriting. First and last, he recorded his dreams, and — as I describe in detail in my Secret History of Dreaming — they gave him plot solutions, character development, insights into the nature of reality that he attributed to some of his characters, and sometimes bridge scenes that could be troweled directly into a narrative. Best of all, journaling kept him going, enabling him to crank out his daily pages for publication no matter how many gins or how much cloak-and-dagger activity or illicit amour he had indulged in the night before.
You don’t have to be a writer to be a journaler, but journal keeping will make you a writer anyway. In the pages of your journal, you will meet yourself in all your aspects. As you keep a journal over the years, you’ll notice the rhymes and loops or cycles in your life. Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian-born historian of religions, was a great journaler. In the last volume of his published journals, he reflects, during a visit to Amsterdam in 1974, on how a bitter setback to his hopes at the time he first visited that city, nearly a quarter century before, had driven him to do his most enduring work. He had been hoping during his earlier visit that his early autobiographical novel, published in English as Bengal Nights, would be a big commercial success, enabling him to live as a full-time novelist. Sales had been disappointing. Had it been otherwise, “I would have devoted almost all my time to literature and relegated the history of religions to second place, even though Shamanism was at the time almost entirely drafted.”7 The world would have gained a promising, and perhaps eventually first-class, novelist; but we might have lost the scholar who first made the study of shamanism academically respectable and proceeded to breathe vibrant life into the cross-cultural study of the human interaction with the sacred.
Synesius of Cyrene, a heterodox bishop in North Africa around 400, counseled in a wonderful essay, “On Dreams,” that we should keep twin journals: a journal of the night and a journal of the day. In the night journal, we would record dreams as the products of a “personal oracle” and a direct line to the God we can talk to. In the day journal, we would track the signs and correspondences through which the world around us is constantly speaking in a symbolic code. “All things are signs appearing through all things. They are brothers in a single living creature, the cosmos.” The sage is one who “understands the relationship of the parts of the universe”8 — and we deepen and focus that understanding by recording signs in our day journal.
Partly because I keep unusual hours and am often embarked on my best creative work long before dawn, I don’t separate my night journal from my day journal. All the material goes into one book of changing heft and composition — a leather-bound travel journal when I am on the road, a big three-ring binder at home. I try to type up my entries before my handwriting (as difficult as Greene’s) becomes illegible and put the printouts in binders. I save each entry with a date and a title in my data files, so I automatically have a running index.
Six Games to Play with Your Secret Book
When you write in your journal, you are keeping a date with your Self. I’m giving “self” a big S because I’m talking about something bigger than the everyday mind, so often prone to distraction or mixed-up agendas, so driven by routines and other people’s requirements.
A date with the Self should be fun. Here are six everyday games to play with your journal.
Write Your Way Through
Whatever ails you or bugs you or blocks you, write about it. Getting it out is immediate therapy. If you keep your journal strictly private (which is essential, by the way), what you put down in these pages can be your everyday confessional, with the cleansing and release that can bring. It’s funny how, when you start by recording your woes, something else comes into play that brings you up instead of down and can actually restore your sense of humor.
When you see and state things as they are, you already begin to change them. Keep your hand moving, and you may manifest the power to rename and re-vision symptoms, challenges, and difficult situations in the direction of resolution and healing.
Catch Your Dreams
Every time you remember a dream, record it. Date your entry and give the dream a title. By giving a name to a dream, you are recognizing that there’s a story to be told, and that you are now in the process of becoming a storyteller. Also jot down your feelings about the dream; your first feelings on waking are the best guidance on what it is telling you.
Make a Book of Clues
The world is speaking to us through coincidence and chance encounters and symbolic pop-ups, giving us clues to the hidden logic of events. Once we start paying attention, we find that synchronicity is a fabulous source of navigational guidance. Write down in your journal anything unusual or unexpected that you notice during the day. Suggestion: note in your journal what appears on the first vanity license plate you spot each day.
Collect Pick-Me-Up Lines
No, I did not say “pick-up lines”! One of the things I treasure in my own journals, and in those of famous dead people that I read, is the collection of interesting and inspiring quotes that grows once we get into the habit of jotting down one-liners that catch our attention. Some recent examples from my own journaling:
“Because we are stars, we must walk the sky.” — Song of Bushmen lion shamans
“An idea is salvation by imagination.” — Frank Lloyd Wright
“You have other centuries to play with.” — Seth, in Jane Roberts’s The Nature of Personal Reality
“Something always goes wrong or there wouldn’t be a story.” — Charles de Lint
“Coincidences are spiritual puns.” — G.K. Chesterton
EZ GOES — vanity plate on a car in front of me
Make Your Own Dictionary of Symbols
Tracking how symbols feature and evolve in your dreams and your experience of the world around you will give you your own encyclopedia of symbols, far superior to all those dream dictionaries, because the snake or the train in your dream is yours, not theirs.
The images that arise in our dreams and in the play of coincidence in waking life often seem to link us to the realm of the archetypes, to universal symbols that seem to repeat again and again in the collective mind of humanity. At the same time, the images that arise spontaneously in dreaming are individual, our personal gifts, and we don’t want to assign an external authority the responsibility of determining the meaning of our dreams or our lives.
It’s fascinating to watch how a personal symbol can evolve over time. Thus the wild animal that scared you in one dream may become your ally when you brave up in a later dream. Or what seemed to be your childhood home