I’m transcribing dreams into obsidian. That sounds so much more esoteric than it is, huh? I’m using the note-taking software, Obsidian, which is just an editor and navigator for a local folder of plain text files containing Markdown. It’s a simple way to keep notes that can link to one another (or to URLs) and be organized with folders and a tagging system. Plenty of other stuff is possible, especially with plugins, but those are the functions I care about.
Sorry for the delay; I won’t bore you with an excuse. I’ve been working on transcribing my dozens of dream recordings (made almost always upon waking, and rarely when something external triggers a sudden recall of a dream). I’m working chronologically from when I started my most recent wave of dream recall efforts; I’ve been trying various methods on and off for years, but it was only in September of last year that I started using audio recordings on my phone, which has proven significantly more consistent than trying to write by hand in a journal or type on a device.
So far, I’ve transcribed my dreams from September and October of 2022, totaling sixteen dreams. That’s about two a week, which is honestly a much better hit rate than I have had in previous waves of practice. I’ve been making efforts to tag dreams with anything that occurs to me as a potential theme or symbol appearing in the dream—most are so far lone tags, but two tags have been applied to four dreams each. Hold on, let me get the graph:
Each of the white dots is a transcribed dream. The green dots are tags I have applied, linked to each of the dreams in which they appear. This graph view may prove unwieldy in the future, assuming some broader tags link to many dreams, but for the moment it’s nice to see that e.g. the two tags applied to the most dreams have no overlap—i.e. no dream of those I have logged so far contains both specific identified friends from waking life and video-game-like mechanics. Two of the four dreams containing friends, however, also contained a prominent animal.
Dream recordings vary wildly in length and detail, from sub-thirty-second recordings of a single ambiguous sentence, to four or five minute retellings containing movement between places, many details, and so on. Not all the tags concern specific contents; it seems likely going forward that the #partially-forgotten and #largely-forgotten tags are going to see a lot of use.
I also have tags referring to qualities of the recording, like #late-recording for recordings not made immediately upon waking, and #inscrutable-phrase for words in a recording that seem unambiguous upon listening but whose meaning is incomprehensible this far removed from the mental state in which the recording was made.
I’ve also established some dubious transcription notation for when audio is ambiguous or confusing; I might change up how this works, but it’s serving for the moment. Text in curly braces (Obsidian already uses [brackets]) is {uncertain} but seems plausible, and increasing question marks bookending the text inside {indicate ?increasing? ??uncertainty?? or ???implausibility???}. Multiple guesses at the same audio are separated with slashes. Three question marks alone indicate audio that I can’t even guess at, though that really should be a different symbol probably. I also occasionally proffer commentary in footnotes, usually to explain context for something I said (if I refer to something I did yesterday, to mention in the footnote what that was) or to provide information I remember but left out (though with the understanding that my recollection significantly after waking doesn’t quite count as first-hand dream evidence).
I’m currently not including in logs the titles I’ve been giving recordings in the phone app, choosing to opt for the date of the recording as the note title instead, but given how often the title is chosen in approximately the same mental state as the recording was made (the app will not save a recording without a title) I may begin including them, for their humor value if nothing else: what word or phrase I use to title the dream can be kind of funny or bizarre, often a minor detail I happened to mention late in the recording, latched onto in desperation to save the file so I can fall back asleep. Setting an earlier alarm in the morning, after which I can fall asleep for another hour or so, has been good both for my dream recall (dreams I have after falling back asleep tend to be vivid and intense—something about falling into REM more rapidly when falling back asleep, I hear?).
Hopefully won’t be so long until the next update. I’ll leave you with a charming dream featuring a recurring animal symbol in my magical practice, the toad:'
My dream involved... somehow pitting a toad against... some other kind of animal... it's already escaped me what it was. {?those were just stand-ins for?} some kind of magical creature or important character, I think. {?and there? ?wasn't?} much like, actual fighting, but uh, {???Montreal???} what to do, so {everybody else} saying what was {???}. And then... {?Frederick?1 ???} were in the room. The toad... {??? ?straps?/?swallowed?} the other {animal}, {?he?} slowly. And um, everyone in that room, (chanting:) keep it down, keep it down. The toad. Then the toad {?it?/?at?} twice its size. Seemed genuinely pretty pleased with itself {about ??? its achievement}.
Names changed to protect the innocent etc. etc.