Dreaming about something good and not writing it down
Do I have fewer good dreams than bad ones?
Probably fewer, but considerably less so than you think, and part of the gap is a recording artefact.
Content analyses do find negative emotion more frequent than positive in dream reports. The gap is smaller than most people assume, and it is widened by what gets remembered and written down: people record what disturbs them and let the pleasant ones go.
This distorts what everybody believes about their own dreaming, including this database until it is corrected for. Read a dream dictionary and you would conclude that dreams are almost entirely anxiety, which is not what the reports say.
The practical instruction is simple. Record the good ones, including the ones where nothing happened. A garden, a river, a kitchen with people in it. Those are the entries a journal is missing.
Where this reads well
A one-line habit change that materially improves a journal, and most people have never been told to do it.
Where it is harder
None, beyond the effort of writing down a dream that does not demand attention.
Worth asking yourself
How many good dreams have I recorded? Do I only write the ones that bother me? What did I leave out this week?
Dream interpretation is subjective. Nothing here is a diagnosis, a prediction, or medical advice.
Sources and reviewed references
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