Dream diary: elements
Since the dream journal would show connections between dreams based on keywords and categories, I need to figure out which categories to use. Obviously, the words tagged to each will depend on what happened them but there are general groups that could be marked somehow. I looked at different dream diary wedsites, there’s a view of one below. I have thought of many of the categories myself but haven’t decided how they should be presented.
The dream diary will be a cross between mindmaps and blogs. Existing mindmapping tools don’t work for this because I don’t like them visually and because I need different sorting categories. Some of them also have a monthly or yearly fee and I don’t feel like paying for a system I don’t even like. Most dream diary websites I wouldn’t even consider using. I will much rather continue writing dreams in notebooks. I’m also not interested enough to spend all my time writing my dreams into a database that is basically the same as my notebooks, I’ll rather continue living and dreaming. A mindmap makes sense but drawing a huge one on paper doesn’t do the trick - I want to see different connections, and since dreaming never stops, there will always be new connections.
Also, whatever I do becomes part of my thinking and visual world, and will affect my dreaming. Sleeping and not sleeping, sleeping enough and not sleeping enough, dreaming and being awake - it’s all fascinating. I’ve had dreams about the workshop.. very little about coding, more about the social relations and the conceptual core. I don’t want to link a horrible blog to a great part of my life. Many sites seem to be based on the idea that others can help interpret dreams. I don’t think strangers necessarily help interpreting dreams of people and situations they don’t know. There may be common symbols (some dream diaries have a good database of different symbols that are interesting) but I don’t think they’re key to interpretation unless they’re really important to the dreamer herself. I’ve held dream diaries for about fifteen years, and dream symbol books have not played a part.
Perhaps at this point it doesn’t even matter how I name the categories or how many of them there are. I want to use my drawings to make the visual side of this. I draw by hand but need to scan and, I assume, vectorize the drawings because I want to make animations. I assume this will take quite a long time.
