Story by Zachary Crain
Graphics by Emily Pack
At the start of 2023, UNC-Chapel Hill senior Julia Milkins wanted to find a way to track her experiences throughout the new year.
She’d heard of people writing down one happy memory from each day, but she wanted to reflect on a wider scope of her experiences. She started keeping a dream journal.
“When I see certain people or certain situations play out in my dreams, it’s oftentimes something that I was ruminating on during the day,” she said. “It’s just interesting to see how that can be reflected in your dreams.”
For Milkins, a dream journal had another, more practical benefit: it established a routine that helped her prepare for the day.
At the beginning of her practice, Milkins woke up every day, poured a cup of coffee, sat down at her desk, pulled out a black and white spiral-bound notebook and filled it with the previous night’s dreams.
“That’s just a really nice way for me to wind down at the beginning of the day and clear my thoughts to prepare for the madness that is school,” she said.
New studies from a pair of researchers at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School — Casher Belinda, a Ph.D candidate, and Michael Christian, a professor and area chair of organizational behavior — suggest that Milkins isn’t alone in experiencing a productivity boost as a result of her dream journal practice.
Belinda and Christian’s research suggests that recalling and ascribing positive meaning to dreams can improve resilience, thus increasing productivity in the workplace.
“Recalling a dream, it’s super fleeting as you go further in the day,” Belinda said. “So being able to jot down a few things — even if it’s just really quick in the morning — can help you not only remember it, but also be something you can not only return to later and then maybe see meaning not only in that dream, but also connections about different dreams feeding into one another.”
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Belinda first became interested in researching the potential impact of dreams on productivity because of a pair of realizations.
First, the doctoral student almost always remembers his dreams and said they have a tendency to set the tone for his day. Second, he was interested in the sense of awe that dreams are capable of producing.
“Awe is a really impactful emotion that we don’t really think about from an organizational standpoint a lot of the time,” he said.
The pair’s research suggests that experiencing awe — which Belinda said could manifest from thoughts of a dreamer’s future to admiration for authority figures — the morning after a dream increases workers’ resilience and improves the ability to overcome obstacles.
“Although dreams are sort of the starting point, a lot of it revolves around bringing this experience of awe into the workplace,” Belinda said. “There’s also a lot of physical and social elicitors of awe as well.”
Belinda said that resilience is a trait that can vary from day-to-day within an individual, and that the sense of awe produced by dreams can provide an uptick in resilience on any given day.
“The reason why awe can help us do that is that it tends to create this small self-appraisal tendency, or you start to think about things in the grand scheme of life,” he said. “It opens your mind to bigger, broader conceptual thinking.”
Milkins noted that she was better able to recall her dreams and see connections between them when she began her dream journal practice — both of which are ideas that Belinda said were key in opening the door for the benefits of dream-based awe.
“When you recall and are starting to reflect on your dreams, maybe you’re laying in bed, it’s sort of like an epiphany,” Belinda said. “So thinking of that part of it and just relishing in that moment for a bit can be useful.”
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Though the benefits of maintaining a dream journal — both personally and in the workplace — are clear, Milkins and the researchers noted that people can sometimes struggle with keeping a consistent practice.
After seeing initial benefits, Milkins said she has been writing in her journal less frequently as the year has gone on.
“A lot of people when they’re starting something new like this, they kind of have to make it into a really big moment,” she said. “And once people make that big announcement of starting they feel like they have to keep it up on a regular basis. Establishing a habit like this definitely takes time, and to be more easy with yourself in terms of like, if you miss on something.”
Even Belinda, who has kept a dream journal at some points in his life, hasn’t maintained one consistently.
“I wish I had more time to do that,” he said.
Despite the difficulties some face with consistency, Belinda said many research participants reaped the benefits of recalling their dreams in a daily practice.
“We were having people journal their dreams more or less,” he said. “We got so much positive feedback about how not only did it start to help them recall certain things or see meaning, but just about the experience overall regardless of recall or meaning. Because your dreams come from within you, it was this sort of self-reflection exercise in some respect.”
He said that participants sent emails thanking them and saying they and their children were now keeping dream journals.
“Even if you don’t reap the specific benefits that we talked about here,” Belinda said. “Just from the idea of exploring yourself it can be beneficial.”
