Do you remember your dreams?

Over the last month, I’ve been able to bring something back from the dream world almost every night. I want to tell you why I’m so excited about the recollection of dreams.

As a child I used to have fantastic dreams - many of which were lucid - where the dream world felt truly immersive and as real as anything else. I would often fly in my dreams, although it was more like swimming in the air than flying. I would break into a run, then jump and begin to glide with my arms outstretched, rolling my body like a dolphin, or moving with a breast-stroke action to get as high as I could before the air got too thin. Then I’d point myself downward like a hawk or a jet in a nose-dive to get enough speed up to arch my body and create lift again. I was utterly free to create my reality and explore vast, open landscapes.

I’d also occasionally have sinister, frightening dreams. In one of these dreams, a stranger was abducting me and was carrying me away. My parents hadn’t noticed, and what’s more, I couldn’t scream out to them because I had no voice and I could hardly move because the air felt as thick as mud. My body was stuck in slow-motion whilst my mind flailed and fluttered in the feeling of powerlessness. Other variations of this dream had me negotiating with my captor, saying and doing whatever I could to make myself seem smaller, more vulnerable, more pathetic and less worthy of attention.

The infant human’s reality tends to be much more fluid. Our minds lack the conditioning necessary to clearly define and interpret the world. We’re just in it. We have imaginary monsters and imaginary friends - except the imagination of a child seems much more like a hallucination than a passing thought. I would routinely find myself lost in my imagination - adventuring in a place which wasn’t quite mind and wasn’t quite world but something of both. As an adult, being at the mercy of my mind isn’t such an exciting prospect. We go through life collecting thoughts and beliefs like the grille of a truck collects bugs. But we’re still playing the same game, taking illusions seriously and looking past obvious truths.

At some point in my teenage, I stopped dreaming nearly as much. I even had periods on my early twenties where a year would go by and I’d remember only a couple of my dreams. It became my new normal, and on more than a few occasions I remember being quite sad that my nights were blank. What had happened to me? Where had this magical world gone? Had I become lost in the waking world and forgotten my innate creativity and mysticism? I think the answer was the former. A part of my mind was buried under a highly structured education which steered me towards having to do things I didn’t understand, let alone desire. My psyche had become rigid, run by programs that I had not chosen, I lost the mental flexibility required to indulge in alternate realities. I was no longer playing my own game, but someone else’s.

When we feel someone else is running the show, we feel out of control. We fear this lack of control and so we stay in the psychological shallows, where there is little space for dreams and possibilities. The dreams return for me when I’m going through periods of deep personal change or self-actualisation. When I re-imagine myself and my life, the fabric of screen of reality seems to soften and I feel as though I can reach through and play with the image behind it. Sometimes this is by choice but at other times, we have no choice. Life can throw us in the deep end and we have to learn to swim around with our unprocessed memories and traumas. The interesting thing about dreams is that they seem like a caricature of waking reality, in which we play both the role of artist and observer. The artist loses himself in the work, then occasionally steps back for a second to see how it’s turning out. In both dreaming and waking life, I’m often unsure of whether I’m watching myself explore my world or actually creating it as I go along.

This is why I love the practice of dream recollection. One of the functions of dreaming is to order, sort and processes daily occurrences. The artwork our sub-conscious mind comes up with is based on the associations and connections made between things, which in turn affects our perception of reality and interpretation of the world (albeit in the background). By looking into our dreams we can see reality through an impressionist lens and perhaps even start re-painting the picture. We’re always dreaming - every night. So how do we ‘get in’ and explore? I’ve found that overcoming the fear of my own mind is helpful. Over the last few years, I’ve progressively become more willing, accepting and fearless when it comes to mental, emotional and spiritual free-diving. Through meditation, my relationships, expression practices, psychedelics and de-conditioning of what I consider to be ‘normal’ I have been able to reconnect more often with the world beyond the ‘ordinary’ default mode mind. I haven’t yet been able to induce a lucid dream, but I’m confident that the seed will be planted by simply thinking about dreams more often and setting an intention to explore the depths.

If you’re interested in dreaming and the subconscious, I’d recommend checking out Matthew Walker’s ‘Why We Sleep’, then Andrew Holecek’s ‘Dream Yoga’, then maybe Sogyal Rinpoche’s ‘Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’. I’d also love to hear about your dreams, or share insights on sleep, dreaming and our relationship with unconscious mind and reality. Consider this an open invitation!