Writing a night

A journal is one night's thread — the thing you remember, the questions she asks, the stills that land, the clues that get set on the table. New Entry opens a blank one. You can have as many as the nights give you. Each is dated. That date is how Tracking and Paradigm know when it happened, so a journal you write on Thursday morning about Wednesday night still belongs to the night, not to the calendar day you sat down.

Starting when you remember almost nothing

You do not need a plot. You do not need a beginning, a middle, and an end. "I only have one image from it" is a complete first line. "The feeling lasted longer than the dream" is a complete first line. "Someone I haven't seen in years was there" is a complete first line. Nalani is built to pull the rest out of you one step at a time. If you try to dump the whole night in one paragraph, she will still meet you there — but the fragments are usually where the thread actually is.

On a blank entry the figure in the middle has thoughts around the crown. Those are starters — first-person openings, short enough to sit on the arc. Tap one and it becomes the first line. They change. They are not the same four twice in a row. After you have journals of your own, some of them start to sound like you: a person who came back, a house you keep, a feeling you left open. You never have to use them. They are there for the mornings when the night is gone and you still want the door cracked.

The starters lean toward openings, recurring nights, waking with the feeling still on you, people, places, the body, time going wrong, knowing you were dreaming, unease, and fragments. If none of them fit, type your own. The placeholder in the composer is the same invitation every time: tell me what you saw.

The composer

The box at the bottom is where the night goes in. Chat is the default — you are talking to Nalani. Imagine is next to it, when you want a still made from the night instead of another sentence (more on that under Pictures). The gallery icon attaches photos you already have. You can paste a photo straight into the box.

Enter sends. Shift+Enter is a new line, so you can write a longer piece without firing it off mid-thought. While she is answering, the send arrow becomes a stop square — tap it if the line went somewhere you do not want to follow. Escape also stops her. If the line goes quiet, wait a breath and send again when you are ready. Nothing you already wrote is lost.

You can send a photo with no text. You can send a reference chip with no text — a person from the Index, a clue from the left rail, a still from Markers — and she will treat that as the thing you want to sit with. Mix them. A sentence plus a photo plus a name from last month is a perfectly normal turn.

The list of nights

Journals live in the left rail, newest near the top, grouped under folders you made or sitting ungrouped underneath. Click one to open the thread. The one you are in stays marked. Search at the top of the rail filters by the words in the night and by folder name — type a person's name, a street, a feeling, and the list shrinks to the journals that hold it.

Right-click a journal (or use the menu on the row) when you want to do something to it besides open it:

• Rename. The title is yours. If you never name it, it stays a new entry until the night gives it one. Rename when you recognize it — "the hallway again," "mom's kitchen," "the one with the water."
• Move to a folder, or back to ungrouped. Folders are yours; nothing auto-files a night into a theme you did not choose.
• Copy as a reference, then paste into whatever you are writing next. A chip appears in the composer so she knows you are pointing at that whole night, not just a sentence.
• Delete. It leaves the list, the calendar, the map. If you are not sure, leave it. Quiet nights still count.

One night or several

Stay in the same journal when you are still inside the same night — you woke up, you wrote a fragment, an hour later another piece surfaced. Start a New Entry when it is a different night, a different visit, or the same house on a different date. Two journals can share a person and a place without being the same night. Paradigm will thread them if they belong together. You do not have to merge them by hand.

You can open an old journal and keep talking. That is how a recurring dream deepens instead of splitting into twelve half-told copies. If the old night is finished and tonight is a return of the same image, a new entry is usually cleaner — Tracking can date it, Paradigm can pin it, and the Index can show that the person came back.