This article analyses how young women record the development of their sentimental relationships with their future husbands in diaries. It studies the way in which these diaries relayed the dreams of young girls who used a pen to describe the feelings that bound them to their lover and to assess their chances of happiness. It examines the possible influence of novels on their writing, and in particular the traces of sentimentality denounced by moralists, philosophers, as well as men and women of letters that appear in them. It also studies night-time dreams which seem to have been little used in diary writing by young women although they are a frequent topic in literature.