Wonder what your dreams are trying to tell you?
Source: Unsplash Yohann Lc
For decades, my most persistent dream involves running in a forest after a little girl heading toward a cliff. Sometimes a full moon shines through the tree tops, other times rain soaks us. Often she wears pajamas, occasionally a summer sundress. I call out for her to stop, but she can’t hear me in the howling wind. She always jumps off the cliff before I can get to her.
The nightmares started around 10-years-old after my 3-year-old sister died. I never spoke of them at the time. I don’t remember when I had the first one or how long they lasted initially before they popped back up in adulthood.
Dr. Rahul Jandial, neurosurgeon, neuroscientist, and author of This is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals about Your Waking Life, says nightmares start between the ages of 5- and 10-years-old and are part of childhood. When they come back in adulthood, the reason is an emotional trigger.
What happens when we dream? Can we coax our brains to remember? And how can we learn to interpret what our dreams are trying to tell us?
what happens when we dream?
Dreams are remarkably similar all over the world and across time — regardless of urban or rural settings, language you speak, developing country or not, or wealth status. Many people experience falling, arriving late, or being chased. Dr. Janial writes, “Given this continuity of dreams across time and place, it seems reasonable to conclude that the characteristics and contents of dreams are baked into our DNA, a function of our neurobiology and evolution.”
Our dreams come in many shapes and sizes. There are daydreams and night dreams. There are nightmares and lucid dreams. Some people claim to never dream, but in reality everyone does, though not everyone remembers. We need to dream. If sleep deprived the first thing we do is create these nighttime narratives, whether we remember them or not.?
These nighttime narratives help us solve problems, come up with creative ideas, practice sports, and help us discover more about who we are. There are many stories of writers, scientists, and artists whose work involved harnessing the power of their dreams.
Steven King came up with The Shining while dreaming. He and his wife were the only two guests in a mountain resort hotel as it was closing for the season. He had a dream his three-year-old son was running through the halls screaming and being chased by a firehose. The nightmare woke him up. He recalls lighting a cigarette. “By the time I was done, the bones of a whole book were firmly set in my mind.”
As we fall asleep, our bodies and minds go through a switching of the guard as the nightshift comes on duty. Our body relaxes and becomes paralyzed (except for our eyes and heart). As Dr. Jandial describes, our brain’s reality checker turns way down, and our imaginative network lights way up. As we focus inward, our mind wanders looking for loose associations in our memory to attach to.
Until recently, sleep research assumed dreams only happened during the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) portion of sleep (~2 hours/night). New research shows when waking people up in dream labs, when all hooked up to machines measuring their brain activity, they dreamed during all phases of sleep. That’s up to a third of our lives spent dreaming. If we didn’t need sleep or dreams, wouldn’t we have evolved past them by now?
can we coax our brains to remember?
After reading Dr. Jandial’s book, I felt like I was missing a golden opportunity. I wanted like to learn how to guide my third-shift better. To spend time working personal relationship concerns from a new perspective, to move a creative project forward, or to check-in on my mental health status.
As for coaxing your brain to remember, Dr. Jandial suggests telling yourself: I will dream tonight. I will remember my dream. I will write it down. You can also prime your brain for creativity or problem-solving about 15 minutes before bed. The key is to craft an emotionally relevant creative project or problem.
Dr. Jandial refers to “sleep entry” as “a cocktail for creativity” and problem-solving. He also writes about a device from MIT to engineer sleep and dreams in a way to maximize creativity. The device wakes you up a couple minutes after falling asleep to capture your dreams while they are still fresh.
Coincidentally, I first learned of Will Dowd and the MIT device for this month’s thought echoes podcast in an article in Nautilus Magazine “Does Dream Inception Work?"
Will used the device 50 times to plant poetry dream seeds. I asked Will what patterns emerged. “The dreams always seemed to have their own agenda. As the dream seeds interact with things that happened during the day and what’s in my subconscious, they became a kind of swarm. A natural phenomenon creating its own shapes with its own trajectory and bizarre plots. They had their own sense of time.”
When Will wrote up short poetic stories from the dream sequences, he felt he had a co-author, “…but my subconscious doesn’t have a name. It felt like a fingerprint from another part of me.”
For the rest of us who don’t have access to the device, Dr. Jandial encourages us to remain still for a moment after we wake-up. To write or type down every thing we remember while still in bed. We have one or two minutes before our reality network comes online. Initially we may start with fleeting fragments. Be patient. After a couple days or a week the fragments will get longer.
And for those who think once a day isn’t enough opportunity to catch your dreams, what about taking naps? Or, if you get up in the middle of the night, why not use those times to record your dream fragments too?
how can we learn to interpret what our dreams are trying to tell us?
After reading Ernest Hartmann, MD’s paper “The Dream Always Makes New Connections: The Dream is a Creation, Not a Replay,” my curiosity to step back into dream recording mode perked up.
Dr. Hartmann asserts that dreams as neither random nor a replay of daytime events. Our brains take bits from our days, people we’ve encountered, information from books and media we’ve consumed, our emotions at this moment in our lives, then weave all the fragments into our memories as a creative, cohesive, symbolic narrative.
These nighttime stories make new connections — they are a creation. Dreams are portals to our inner-selves and our mental health. He asks, “Who is best poised to interpret the emotional resonance of our own dreams, but each of us?“
When Dr. Hartmann described how a character in your dream reminds you of one person, then suddenly is someone else. How places shift and combine, you can be in one location one moment and another moment it’s as if walking into another room and you are someplace else.
The brain works in semantic maps like clusters of grapes. Transportation in a dream may morph from a train into a car, or with dwellings a house might change into a school. Again, think of what metaphor that image conjures up for you and what possible meaning does it have in this moment of your life.
He shared research of why nightmares develop between the ages of 5- and 10- years-old, as kids start working through their sense of self and their imaginary friend activity picks up. How nightmares as adults recur when an emotional situation triggers us in our adult life.
With my nightmare about the little girl running toward a cliff, when they came back in adulthood, I now know the reason. That repeated sequence embodied my feeling of helplessness. Back then to save my sister from cancer. As an adult during times I did not feel in control — up popped the nightmare.
Sometimes they were around the anniversary of my sister’s death, other times when my girls were the same age and I knew I couldn’t save them from everything that could hurt them. Still other times, they were work related during acquisitions and mergers. Now I understand why I kept having them.
During the ’90s when I learned about lucid dreaming, I went back into the nightmare and changed the narrative. I ran faster and caught up with the little girl. She stopped. We jumped off the cliff together as the cliff morphed into a roller coaster ride. I held her tight and kept her safe. In some versions we were even laughing and having fun. When my granddaughters start having nightmares in a few years, I feel better prepared to help them understand.
Dreams invite us to look deeper into ourselves and contemplate their messages. As Dr. Jandial concludes, “…reflecting on dreams is an important aspect of a life lived fully.”
WOULD LOVE TO HEAR YOUR COMMENTS. WHAT DREAMS YOU HAVE?
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