One terrifically useful for idea for what to write in your journal is almost blinding in its obviousness. Fill your journal with ideas. If you are a writer, your journal can be a place to jot down ideas for plots, characters, themes or dialogue. An artist can keep a journal that focuses just as much on sketches as on verbal descriptions of places. The inventive mind is capable of coming up with dozens of great ideas every day, but most of them will stream from your consciousness like a stray leaf floating into the sewer on a rainy day if you don’t use your journal to latch on them for posterity.
Many people keep journals specifically devoted to detailing their dreams. Not every one has the power to remember their dreams with great specificity, much less the ability to create dream worlds worth remembering. Dream journals can be potentially useful in helping you to interpret the rich imagery and surreal symbolism of your dreams by allowing you to connect patterns that you keep track of by recording information such as dream content, daily events previous to the dream, what you ate the day of the dream and your emotional state prior to sleeping.
Films, especially those seen inside a darkened movie theater, have been compared to dream imagery. Movies may also be seen as contemporary replacements for mythology and folklore. A journal in which you are free to write analysis of films you have seen without the need for self-censorship that comes with publishing them allows you to treat film with all the seriousness the Greeks awarded to stories of Zeus and Athena. This type of journal allows you to learn honest life lessons by carefully analyzing the fictional stories portrayed on screen that carry so much influence on societal development.
Travel journals are an effective way to remember all the little things about your vacations and trips that aren’t captured on film or video. Revisiting your travel journal will remind you of that funny waiter in the diner just outside that forgotten little town on the way to Disney World or bring a tear as you are surprised at the depth of emotion you felt when you visited Arlington National Cemetery.