I am recording my dreams for quite some time now. At first, there was a classical dreamers’ dilemma – what can I do to increase my dream recall and remember my nightly adventures? At times I wasn’t able to remember more than a detail or two from moments before awakening and this was a frustration… I tried everything and anything that crossed my path – from dream herbs and dream enhancers, crystals, meditation, (instant) recapitulation, tapping (EFT) etc. Some things helped, others didn’t. But that didn’t discourage me; I kept writing everything I could remember upon each awakening and it paid off. In a long run, that is.
With practice (and time) dream diaries started to pile up. At that point I was faced with another problem – what to do with all the dreams I wrote down? Searching for dream signs in so many diaries became next to impossible so I had to find another solution. I decided to transfer them to a computer so I can use “search engines” to look for specific recurring elements at a later time. Said-done. It took me nearly three months to type hundreds of dreams into a single document. Everything looked great at first – I could create an index of all dreams, I could use different colors and fonts to differentiate different dream categories and dream signs. Everything seemed great… until the file exceeded 1000 pages. Then, problems re-appeared. First, it took forever for the file to load. Then it started crashing after I executed a search for specific keyword. And I was back to square one. I started looking for a different solution. After a long internet search I discovered that there is actually no product to meet my needs and I was left with no other option then to dig myself into it and come up with something worthwhile.
Since I’m a little familiar with VB Net programming, I decided to give it a try and create something myself. I took MS Access as the basis and started building a database to transfer my dream diaries to. As before, it worked like a charm at first – I created the database, some entry forms and reports and everything looked pretty neat. My problem with entering dreams was solved. Or so it seemed. When I started “coding” (copy/pasting the code that I needed from various sources) everything started to fall apart, again.
And the idea about actual dream recording/analyzing software was born…