Dream Journal - Entry Five

Dream Journaling: Unlock the Hidden World Within

Every night, you journey to a realm where the impossible becomes real, where you fly without wings, converse with strangers who feel like old friends, and experience emotions more vivid than waking life itself. Yet by morning, these extraordinary adventures fade like mist in sunlight, leaving only fragments—or nothing at all.

Dream journaling is your bridge between these two worlds.

It's the simple yet transformative practice of capturing your dreams on paper the moment you wake, preserving the fleeting visions that your subconscious mind weaves while you sleep. More than just recording nighttime stories, dream journaling is an intimate conversation with the deepest parts of yourself—a dialogue with the 90% of your mind that operates beneath conscious awareness.

How It Works

The practice is elegantly simple:

Keep a journal beside your bed. The moment you wake—before checking your phone, before getting up, before the dreams slip away—reach for your journal and write. Describe everything you remember: the scenes, the people, the emotions, the bizarre logic that made perfect sense moments ago. Don't worry about grammar or coherence. Just capture it all.

Do this consistently. Every morning, even if you remember only fragments or feelings. Your dream recall will strengthen like a muscle with practice.

Review and reflect. Periodically read through your entries. Notice patterns, recurring symbols, emotional themes. Your dreams often speak in metaphor and symbol, revealing truths your waking mind might overlook.

Why It Matters

Dream journaling opens doorways you never knew existed. It sharpens your memory, deepens self-awareness, and can spark creativity by tapping into your mind's most unfiltered storytelling. Many people discover solutions to waking problems, process difficult emotions, or even achieve lucid dreaming—the ability to become aware and conscious within the dream itself.

But perhaps most profoundly, dream journaling reminds you that your inner life is vast, strange, and worthy of attention. It's an act of honoring the full spectrum of your consciousness, acknowledging that who you are extends far beyond the person you present to the world each day.

Your dreams are waiting. All you need to do is remember them.

Entry Five: The dreamer had a vivid, multi-part dream where they were first a mermaid fleeing from a dark evil force that killed their family. The dreamer found refuge in a pool where kind elderly couple discovered you, helped them transform from tail to legs (painfully), and welcomed you into their home—which appeared to be a safe house for other magical beings. The dream shifted and the dreamer became a wooden boy playing in the woods who got separated from friends and surrounded by sinister laughing darkness. Finally, the dreamer found themselves in a familiar recurring dream location: a decrepit wooden carnival. The whole experience felt like it could be a story concept about a sanctuary for magical creatures escaping from some mysterious darkness.

Common Symbols are where this rewriting it all down loses me, because there's ten years of information stored over sixty pages on a google docs file saved to an email I used for my job at KCTY ten years ago. But common themes are:

Mermaid - Dreaming of mermaids often symbolizes a connection to your emotions, intuition, and subconscious, representing themes of transformation, freedom, temptation, or hidden desires, depending on the dream's context and your feelings, potentially signaling inner shifts, a pull towards fantasy, or warnings about seduction and emotional depths.

The Dark - Darkness in a dream typically symbolizes fear, uncertainty, and the unknown, often reflecting feelings of being overwhelmed, depressed, or lacking direction in life. It acts as a manifestation of distress or anxiety, indicating hidden problems or a need to confront personal, emotional challenges. However, it can also signify a need for introspection or a, sometimes, protective, subconscious space.

Wooden Boy - could have referred to my favorite Disney movie growing up and a way to grab my attention at the time, which hadn't been a success until 2019 almost two and a half years on weed and trauma.

Reflecting on it now in 2026 it's almost heart breaking for me who had had such a spiritual connection to myself before weed, who may never get thst emotional response back...

4/30/2017

Last night/this morning I had what could be the best dream ever. (For different reasons of course). In my dream I was a Mermaid who showed up in a pool one night after a huge storm, from what I could gather between the few times that I woke up and went back to sleep, I was running from something evil, something that killed my entire family and most of my friends, a darkness of some sort (that has a name I’ll get to it). When I landed in this pool a light went off on the house next to it, I did my best to shy from the light but I was soon discovered by an older man and his very little older wife. It took them some time to gain my trust but when they did, they told me to climb out of the pool, which was strange because I was a Mermaid and they knew that. But I did as I was told, swimming up to the rim of the pool, sitting on the step under the water and lifted myself up onto the cement. The tiny old woman had receded into the house and came back out with a pink towel and some clothes.

“Dry your tail” the old man said.

“What?” I asked, as I was handed the towel and the clothes.

“You can’t come inside soaking wet, dear.” The little old lady said with a gentle smile on her face.

Thunder clapped in the sky above us and I quickly jumped back into the pool where it was safe and ducked under the water, the woman giggled a bit and the man shook his head. I emerged from the water soaking wet once again and felt my face get warm as I looked at the two elders in front of me.

“Sorry” I mumbled.

“It’s okay, dear.” The little old woman reassured me.

“Let’s try this again. Quickly now, there seems to be a storm coming” The old man said, he picked up the towel and change of clothes and handed them to me again.

When my tail was finally dry, I felt a sharp pain radiate from my hips, it burned all the way down my fin like fire. I let out a gaping scream in pain and reached for the pool again.

“Don’t!” the man belt out.

“Look Dear” the old woman said to me.

She was pointing at what used to be my dark purple fin. I looked down at it and gasped.

“Congratulations” the man said. I looked up in horror and confusion. “You’ve got legs” He smiled a big toothless smile. The little old woman hit him gently on the stomach.

“Oh posh, the poor thing doesn’t know what this place is Frank.” She said. “Come on dear, let’s get you up” She said to me holding out her hand. I took her hand and fell a little, my legs shook violently underneath my weight. I fell two or three times on my knees before getting the hang of what the old man said were my ‘sea legs’. When I looked up after getting my bearings I noticed a few faces were peeking out from their curtain. The old man noticed to and stepped in front of me, waving his arms at the curious faces.

It started to rain as I entered their house.

“Good timing” the old man said as he closed the big wooden door behind me. “Sara, will you show her to her room?” The old man said as we entered deeper into the house. He parted ways with us and headed toward a small group of what looked like children.

“What is this place?” I asked the older woman.

“A safe place” she told me.

When I woke up the first time, I wanted to write this down, but as soon as I got that tickle to write. I felt myself fall asleep again and dream. And so, the dream continued. When the dream continued, I was a new character in this story.

In this section of the dream, I was a little boy made of whittled wood. I was playing at a park in the middle of the woods with a few other familiar children (the children who had curiously watched me from the window in the dream before). This dream was darker and scarier than the last so it didn’t last very long. But in the dream I was this boy, I was happily playing on the equipment in the woods when the wind picked up the dead leaves around us.

When the wind died down everyone was gone and it was noticeably darker than it had been, I looked up, thinking that there were clouds that had covered the sky. But when I looked up, the sky was blue.

“Heeheehee” I heard from all around me, I moved my head and looked around frantically feeling a hint of fear start to pump through my veins. “Heeheehee” the sound of laughter grew louder and louder. I knew what I had to do. I bolted into a run and called out for my friends.

There was no answer but the loud, anxiety inducing, “heeheehee”. Before I knew it I was surrounded by darkness. I couldn’t escape.

I let out an anxiety scream and woke up. It was such a weird feeling. I went back to sleep once the adrenalin kind of died down and I was now another person in this story, I was a nameless who was trapped inside of an old worn down Carnival, everything was made of wood and chipped white washed. I knew this place well because I’ve had countless dreams about it. When I woke up shortly after seeing this place. I knew I had to write about this dream… It’s now three hours later and I am tired of writing about it, but it does seem like it could be a good story idea.

A safe house for Magical Creatures fleeing from the Darkness

But what is it?

That is the question.