Hi Reader!

I’m excited to announce that my independent publishing press has reached a new milestone. We are collaborating with Elsewhere.to and together have created the world’s first connected dream journal system.

In a lot of ways, the project epitomizes the central mission of my work, which has always been about integrating the best of 21st century thought with the intuitive ways of knowing prized by our ancestors: dreams, visions and imagination: "the best of the old and new.”

What is a connected dream journal?

The connected dream journal system lessens the friction of reporting, archiving, and analyzing on your dreams like never before.

It solves a problem I have personally had for years – how to get all the cognitive and mindfulness benefits of dream journaling by hand, and also be able to easily digitize the dreams for thematic analysis after the fact. If you’re like me, you might dozens of old notebooks of dreams, and no way to track changes in your dreams over time. Or, you've got a massive word doc with hundreds of dreams, but have missed out on immediacy of recording them and sketching the powerful visual images.

Now you can do both!

With the Elsewhere Dream Journal, you can record your dreams old school style—pen and paper— then scan the page using the Elsewhere app on your smartphone or tablet. The app digitizes your handwriting (it’s remarkably good at this: I have to correct only a few words each time) and then you can watch your dreams come alive with analysis, image generation, and symbol mapping.

What makes this journal premium

A lot of thought went into creating this premium dream journal. I’m a total journal nerd and so are the folks at Elsewhere. The journal lays flat, and come with 150 digital scanning credits. This should be enough to scan every page in this book, plus some extra. It's also got a writable patch on the spine for recording the date range of your dreams.

The paper is recycled and weighted at 120gsm: that gives it a robust texture to work with for most pen types. This is heavier paper than most lined journals on the market. It not only prevents ink bleed-through but also reduces ink ghosting (when you can see the ink from the other side of the paper). This art-friendly paper weight is important because a quarter of each two page spread is unlined so you can sketch the most significant images of your dreams with some light coloring (such as crayon or colored pencil). You can upload your own dream images into the Elsewhere Journal app as well, or generate a stylized (and ethically sourced) dream image as well.

The journal also comes with five pages of dream symbol stickers designed by artist Yoh Yasuda. Categories of dreams (like lucid, nightmare), common themes (being chased, flying, falling), and symbolic elements (tree, fire, flowers) let you easily mark your dreams for at-a-glance recognition later.

The possibilities of digital dream analysis

This is such a cool time to be a dreamer. I remember how, years ago, my dream researcher friends used to talk about how computing would eventually help us understand our dreams, and now it's finally happening. On the free level of Elsewhere, you record unlimited dreams, get 15 dream interpretations a month, and a lot more features such as automatic tagging/symbol detection, charts, search, and export. But if you subscribe for $4.99/month, the full suite of Elsewhere’s analysis features is yours to explore, including more styles of dream interpretation, end-of-year dream reports and more.

The dream symbol tracking is one of my favorites. As your digital dream journal deepens over time, your personal mythology is revealed through patterns of how your specific dream symbols relate to each other, and to the dreamer’s own revealed attitudes in the dreams themselves.

Much of this deep analysis happens through the grace of machine learning and large language models, but this is no AI slop that was scraped indiscriminately scraped off the web. For example, some analysis draws directly on the work of psychologist David Fontana and dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley's datasets from the Sleep and Dream Database. I have to admit I was shocked at some of the insights the Elsewhere app gave me about my dream patterns. I take these lightly, as something to gut check against my own intuitions, but it's great especially if you don't have access to a dream group or trusted friends to share dreams with.

You can pick up the Elsewhere Dream Journal: A Place for Dreams, exclusively available on my newly redesigned Dream Studies Press.

New podcast episode is out: Dreams and Sacred Activism

In this new episode of the Dream Studies Podcast, I talk with Dr. Kim Mascaro, a licensed therapist, professor, and author of the new book Dreaming with the Earth-Mind.

We discuss sacred activism: the practice of blending spiritual growth, dreamwork, and social and environmental justice.

The themes of this episode are probably the most important aspects of my work and Kim’s work too, threading social justice, imaginal studies, and ancestral recovery.

In this episode, the conversation takes us into:

· Sacred Activism – how it differs from activism rooted in anger or shadow

· The Maui Wildfires – Kim’s firsthand account of the 2023 fires on Maui, and how the tragedy reshaped her activism and dreamwork

· Decolonizing Lucid Dreaming – A critique of the default Western paradigm of lucid dreaming, and a call to reconnect dreamwork with collective spiritual depth

· Recovering Indigenous European Medicine Ways – Kim’s journey reconnecting with her Italian and Irish ancestry, as well as the deep wisdom of the Paleolithic caves in Southern France

· Dreams as a Path to Collective Healing – we swap ancestral dreams, illustrating how dreamwork nourishes both individual and collective wellbeing

and if you dig it, subscribe and leave a 5 star review!

Independence Day: Dreaming edition

Kelly Bulkeley just published an interesting and timely piece about the deaths of US founding fathers Benjamin Franklin and John Adams…who both died exactly 200 years ago, within hours of each other, on the Fourth of July . That's weird enough, but the truly eerie part is that their mutual friend Benjamin Rush foretold this in a precognitive dream some seventeen years earlier…

Looking for more support?

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It's a community, and it's also a roadmap. You can take the included on-demand courses to solve whatever problem you're working with right now: minimizing nightmares, getting more rest, encouraging more dream recall, and of course, inviting powerful lucid dreams and other kinds of extraordinary experience.

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And don't forget the coupon code when you register. And if you find out it's not for you, we have a two week refund policy, no questions asked.

May you sleep well and dream strong!

Ryan D. Hurd, founder of the Dream Portal and Dream Studies Press