Understanding Your Dreams: Getting Organized

“This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Write in a book all the words I have spoken to you’” (Jer. 30:2, NIV).

(Note: Today’s post is a continuation of yesterday’s.)

Are you getting excited about the idea of connecting more with God’s nighttime messages to you? Do you feel led to keep a general journal of His communication to you, or perhaps specifically a dream journal?

Either way, these pointers, continued from yesterday’s list, will enhance your efforts to keep track of what He is saying. They are strategies that He has taught me over the years – and many of them, I wish I had known sooner. I pray you are blessed by them as you press ever deeper into His heart. The next few have to do with establishing an effective organizational system for accessing your dreams in the future.

4) Add page numbers to your journal. (I’ll explain why in a moment). You can either do this all at once, or as you go. I have sometimes grabbed moments when I was helping my kids with homework, for this activity. While waiting for them to finish a problem, I would write in as many page numbers as possible, at the top of each journal page. Often, though, I don’t have those kinds of unoccupied moments available. Yet, filling in hundreds of page numbers by hand takes a while. My solution is to just add ten page numbers at a time, repeating the pattern each time I fill up ten more journal pages with dreams.

5) Give each of your dreams a title. Lean into Holy Spirit for this. Try to capture the main point of the dream in the title. This will aid to the process of beginning to unpack its meaning. If you’re not sure, it’s okay to leave a blank line at the top and fill it in later with the title that He gives you at that time.

6) At the beginning of each new journal, leave space to create a table of contents. This is where the page numbers and dream titles come in. You’ll want to leave several pages blank for this purpose. Over time, you can gradually create the table by adding the dreams one by one as they come. What about journals used to keep track of everything God is speaking to you and not just dreams? In that case,  you can use the table of contents to list the main subjects of your journal entries.

Another option here would be to create a table of contents located outside your actual journal. In my case, I didn’t learn this practice until a few years ago. As a result, I have a whole lot of past journals filled up, with no table of contents. Little by little, I am going through them and creating a separate table of contents for each one, on my phone. That way, when I want to look back at a particular download from Holy Spirit, it’s much easier to find among the piles of journals that have accumulated over the years.

7) Include the date at the top of each dream. If you travel a lot, make note of the place where you had the dream as well. This may be relevant to the interpretation. If you woke up at a certain time that seemed meaningful, make sure and record that too.

You will find that dates are quite important, as you keep track of God’s progressive work in your life. Reviewing my journals, I recently made an exciting discovery. Comparing dates, I realized that I had two dreams, almost exactly a year apart from each other, on the same exact topic. Thankfully, the second dream revealed a significant amount of growth since the previous one twelve months earlier. I found this wonderfully encouraging.

Here’s some food for thought: God told Jeremiah to write down in a book all His words to him (Jer. 30:2). Every single last one of them. Now, obviously, our journals will never become canonized Scripture as Jeremiah’s revelations did. Nonetheless, making a permanent record of His rhemas (revealed words) to us is one of the best things we could ever do for ourselves.

Stay tuned for more pointers to come on this subject!

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Do you ever have trouble finding a journal entry you wrote several years ago? Do you have any additional ideas to share for keeping track of multiple volumes of journaled treasures?