• Have paper and pen at bedside.
• Before you settle in for sleep, ask for the dream to come in your prayer.
• Upon natural awakening, lie still with your eyes closed and recall your dream.
• In recording, get any verbal message down first.
• In the morning, write your notes out fully in your journal.
• Give your dream a title
• Underscore symbols or images—use a free association or mindmapping method to brainstorm what they might mean.
• Share your dream with a friend.

• Objective or Subjective?

Are the people and places familiar to us from our waking lives, or are they unknown to us? (People known to us, but from the distant past, may be in a subjective dream. Famous people we know only from the media could appear in an objective dream.)

• Compensatory or Confirmatory?

Is the dream showing us something we are missing in our conscious waking lives, or it is confirming something about which we are indecisive or have ambivalence? Confirmatory dreams tend to have us experiencing in the dream an emotion similar to that we have in waking life.

• Transitory or Enduring?

Transitory dreams tend to be more about a current or imminent experience—some situation. They tend to be somewhat less vague. Enduring dreams address long standing issues (such as a marriage of many years, a personality issue, etc.)

• Proactive or Reactive?

How are you reacting in the dream? Are you able to take action, or are you observing the action without directly impacting the course of events?

* from Dream Thinking by Alan Quenk and Naomi Quenk (1995)