Gimicky, good inside it's niche.

If youre playing Higher Education, using Dream-Enhancing Serum and some other hand-size combos both existing and upcoming, this is a no-brainer good addition to that archetype. When set up you can easily expect to be playing this for completely free, routinely.

Love it, also hugely frustrating.

You need some "search" groundwork to make this thing useful, Mr. "Rook" and Eureka! are good startpoints. If you get an opening "Rook" and slam a couple Astounding Revelation in the first set of searches you'll be in a great spot to win the scenario, if you dont find an early Mr. "Rook" then you're a bit screwed as your draws will get muddled with an Astounding Revelation here and there.

If the wall of text on the in-depth review seems like a lot, here's a couple outstanding combos for this card other than Mr. "Rook":

• Roland Banks with Stick to the Plan, automatically hits one Astounding Revelation at the start of the match, you can leave it at that with just 1 Astounding Revelation in your deck or you can then try to find the other copies with Mr. "Rook" or Tetsuo Mori or Prepared for the Worst.
• Arcane Initiate, less strong than the above but an Arcane Initiate + Mr. "Rook" doubles your shot at starting a scenario with a roundly search mechanic that pulls out the Astounding Revelations.

This thing is frustrating, but trust me, it's strong.

TL:DR. Very good even if your name is'nt Daisy Walker.

3 XP for a 1 resource discount and 2 instances of a 2 resource discount + a bonus action. Obviously the card is great, but it competes with other upgrade cards (you know, the crappy cards that stay crappy until upgraded...).

Obviously a Daisy Walker will be doing this upgrade at some point, uniquely though the limited nature of the discount brings Old Book of Lore into the limelight for non-Daisy people as a straight-up useful support mechanic. That said, the reason Old Book of Lore looks so worn is because Daisy just outright refuses to stop reading it.

Cool tricks:

• The investigator getting the free play isnt performing an action, so no attack of opportunity. You can help a friend replace an empty weapon under pressure or play a key event, especially useful is said events are dramatically useful like Cunning Distraction, Backstab or Elusive.
• Enraptured and Truth from Fiction get great value on this thing.
• Put into play a skill pump or persistent boost that can then be used on every action in the players's turn.

The card is good enough for any to use (especially Mandy Thompson), it just feels bad to spend those actions when you could just be playing Daisy. So. Dont feel bad?

Love skill cards, love this thing. I'll make this review simple and short.

Get an Unexpected Courage. This, in of itself is a brilliant mechanic, making Dream Diary unique among the research cards as being actually useful at 0xp. Also you get a skill, so it combos with Grisly Totem and can also be used on friends. It IS action intensive (takes 2 actions and 2 resources to start seeing a benefit, it starts getting good by the time youre using it for the third time) and takes up a hand slot but still. Very useful. Note that this cards's strength comes from flexibility, so if ALL you want to do is discover clues, look elsehwere, but if you want to make the occational , or test then Dream Diary is great.

All the upgrades then supercharge the mechanic by giving you a free Unexpected Courage to use every single turn that supercharges depending on which variant you go for, the options include being in combat, being at hard locations to investigate or playing the big-hand strategy. By the way, for those types that do nothing but investigating the upgraded variants are still totally worth it!

Brilliant card. Brilliant upgrades.

This thing is extreemely annoying, I looked at the first mechanic, not liking it for the price, then looked at the draw mechanic, started loving it. Tried it and realized that very typically if i'm seeing a second copy of a thing, the first copy is in play or in the discard pile, so I came back to realizing that it's all about that first mechanic... Which I didnt like.

So. Big hand characters like this, Higher Education + Extensive Research, characters in strategies that make having cards in hand a distinctly useful effect.

Cute combo: With this in play and using Old Book of Lore you can snipe secondary copies of cards intentionally to artificially boost your drawspeed. HELLO Daisy.

This is a good card, it's just extreemely unrewarding if you try playing it outside it's niche.