Most dream journals die in the first week, and it's rarely because the person didn't have anything to write. It's because they tried to write it well — full sentences, half-asleep, at the exact moment their memory of the dream was already dissolving. By the time the paragraph is finished, the dream is gone and so is the motivation to try again tomorrow.
The version that survives is smaller than that. Keep the journal — paper or notes app, whichever is already open when you wake up — within arm's reach, and write fragments, not prose. A few nouns and a feeling: 'old apartment, locked door, dad, anxious.' That's enough to reconstruct the dream fully an hour later, when you're actually awake enough to write well, and it takes ten seconds at 6am instead of ten minutes you don't have.
Do this every morning for two weeks, even on the mornings you're sure you didn't dream. Recall is a skill, and it improves fast once your brain learns that dreams are worth holding onto for those first few seconds instead of letting them dissolve. Most people notice a real jump in how much they remember by the end of the first week.
Once you have a few weeks of fragments, read back through them together instead of one at a time. Patterns that are invisible inside a single dream — the same setting, the same person, the same emotional note — tend to jump out immediately once you can see five or six entries side by side.