Some history on my interest in dreams

I have kept a dream journal on and off for the last sixteen years. During that time, I also transcribed a number of dreams that have remained with me since I was a child. The urge to record on paper that which transpired during sleep would often strike and I'd take up pen and paper in the morning — detailing events, characters and emotions of the dreams I experienced. The more entries I recorded, the more dreams I would remember. Each entry would become more detailed as well — almost as if my memory was getting stronger with each entry.

Since 1990, I have recorded over 600 dreams. On average, that's about a dream per week. But typically, I would go for long stretches without writing a single entry and then — all of the sudden — record ten to twelve days in a row. Sometimes years would go by without a dream recorded. On the other hand, some years were extremely fruitful: While traveling abroad in 2000 for six months, I faithfully recorded 150 dreams.

I have always had an interest in dreaming. Along with the dream journal, I experimented with lucid dreaming, even working with a UVA engineering student to design a lamp that blinked at certain points during the night (using a vacation timer bought at Wal-Mart). I was hoping that the blinking light would become a signal to my dreaming mind that I was in dream state and that this acknowledgment would trigger an awareness that I was asleep. It never worked. The dreams I recorded while the lamp was operational didn't indicate any active recognition of my state of consciousness, nor did they include any blinking lights.

I met Robert Van de Castle, author of Our Dreaming Mind in 1996. His work, and the work of other dream content analysts (like forefather Calvin Hall) fueled my academic interest in the subject of dreams. During the travels mentioned above, I conducted rudimentary content analysis on the dream reports I kept and found that life events, characters, etc. crept into the reports about two weeks after they took place in 'real life.' I was also able to validate some content analysis theories put forth by Hall and Van de Castle (like the ubiquity of dream characters corresponding to the ubiquity of actual people in my life at the time).

Sawlogs: a Community Dream Blog

I have always envisioned a data repository of dreams whose content could be sliced and diced into different categories in order to offer insight, community and clarity to the dreamer. Sawlogs is just such a repository - with a usable, clean interface for the dreamers to interact with those numbers that represent their dreams (and the dream of others). Best of all, the dreamer is part of a group, and their dreams can interact through similar content - which is displayed on each dream's page.

My aim or goal with Sawlogs is simple: provide a web site that offers dreamers the best way to store, search, sort and share their dreams with others. Along the way, Sawlogs helps out the dreamer by taking the content of the dreams and delivering analysis based entirely on what has been described on the web site.

I hope you enjoy using Sawlogs as much as I enjoyed creating it.

Rick Smith
dreaming@sawlogs.net