dreambook converts a dream journal into an ebook (EPUB format).

I did a big collation of my various dream journals in 2024 and wanted to make an ebook out of them to read at leisure and possibly use as a source for art imagery. I used the Calibre ebook converter for awhile, but it was relatively slow and I had trouble with the resulting table of contents; Pandoc is the most commonly cited alternative for coverting between formats, but this did not install cleanly on my Mac using Homebrew.

I also thought that "rolling my own" would be a good oportunity to learn how the EPUB format worked. This did involve reverse engineering some example EPUBs, the result of which was this relatively minimal epub template.

The resulting product is relatively fast, running in about a quarter of a second for my roughly 400-entry dream journal.

The project as a whole is described at length in the blog post, Wrangling Half a Thousand Dreams.

• Babashka, a fast-starting Clojure interpreter for scripts.
• A dream journal, written in Org Mode format, similar in format to the one in example/dreams.org.

Tested on Mac. Probably works on Linux.

The resulting EPUB output for my journal has been tested in Calibre, on Apple Books (Mac, iPad, iPhone), and occasionally on a Kindle and a Kobo device.

See example/dreams.org for an example of the format. Dreams must be entered in subsections using Org's date format; the subsections for each year should fall under a top-level heading for that year. For example:

* 2011

** <2011-04-26 Tue>

After a long day of work, I am walking to the train.  Without warning, [....]

There is no installation per se; just clone the repository and run the script.

./dreambook

Then, open dreams.epub in your favorite ebook reader.

The default input file is $HOME/org/dreams.org; an optional introduction file $HOME/org/dreams-intro.org can be used to set up frontmatter to the book and $HOME/org/dreams-collophon.org can be used to set up any concluding content. These file locations are configurable:

./dreambook -d /path/to/dreams.org \
            -i /path/to/dreams-intro.org \
            -c /path/to/dreams-collophon.org \
            -j /path/to/dreams-cover.png

See also docker-smoketest for a working example used in the CI build.

  -d, --dreamsfile    $HOME/org/dreams.org
  -i, --introfile     $HOME/org/dreams-intro.org
  -c, --collophonfile $HOME/org/dreams-collophon.org
  -j, --coverfile     $HOME/org/dreams-cover.png
  -a, --author        $USER
  -t, --title         eBook of Dreams
  -w, --words
  -h, --help

In addition to creating the EPUB file, dreambook prints a report of number of dreams per year, as well as the total number of dreams:

$ ./dreambook

EPUB 'dreams.epub' generated successfully.
1985:   68 ....................................................................
1986:   59 ...........................................................
1987:   10 ..........
1988:    7 .......
1989:    9 .........
1990:   29 .............................
1998:    1 .
2000:   10 ..........
2001:    2 ..
2002:   34 ..................................
2003:    3 ...
2004:    3 ...
2005:    4 ....
2006:    1 .
2011:    4 ....
2017:    2 ..
2019:   68 ....................................................................
2021:    2 ..
2022:   20 ....................
2023:   14 ..............
2024:   35 ...................................
TOTAL: 385
$

Or, on the supplied example,

$ ./dreambook -d example/dreams.org \
              -i example/intro.org \
              -c example/collophon.org \
              -j example/cover.png

EPUB 'dreams.epub' generated successfully.
1987:    1 .
2003:    1 .
TOTAL: 2
$

It can be interesting to see what words are most common in your dreams. To view the top words (excluding the most common English words), run:

./dreambook -w   # (or --words)

Example:

$ ./dreambook --words -d example/dreams.org
are basement bus crawl eating feel fifteen find fit
friends house i'm it's kfc manhole many place quiet sitting
$

• bb test runs the tests
• bb fmt reformats the code using cljf (install separately)

Copyright © 2024, John Jacobsen. MIT License.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.