stranded in

dreamland

an exploration of the human subconscious

through our engagement with the realm

dream

I squinted my eyes to examine the blue tinted, dimly lit space I suddenly found myself standing in. The air smelled like poppyseed buns, sport peppers, and...fish? I whipped my head around and realized that the wall directly behind me was actually a window that spread across the entire length of the room. Upon peering into the window's thick glass, hands cupped around my eyes, an enormous beluga whale swam across my field of vision, followed by a smooth, slippery dolphin. An underground fish tank! I thought to myself, like the one at the aquarium downtown! I noticed a red and yellow striped Vienna Beef cart perched in the corner of the room, next to an ominously steep, seemingly never-ending staircase, so I quickly snatched a hot dog from the cart before eagerly returning my gaze to the tank.

All at once, the aquarium’s rubber flooring was replaced with thousands of pennies, some shiny and new, others with Lincoln’s head barely visible beneath layers of filth. Perplexed and excited by the prospect of collecting a few hundred dollars in change, I knelt down to pick up one of the shinier pennies that lay beneath my bare feet. But before I could peel it off the floor, both my mustard smothered frank and my tiny toddler body were knocked to the ground by a nudge from behind. I stood back up and twirled around to identify my attacker, only to find myself facing an enormous, animate, and evidently antagonistic chocolate chip cookie. The cookie proceeded to chase me in circles around the aquarium, and every time I ambushed it with a big, threatening, baby-toothed bite, the cookie would effortlessly regenerate and double in size. After what felt like hours of franticly fending off this predatory pastry, I determined that the ominous staircase was my only viable escape route. I mustered the courage to run as fast as I could towards the ascending darkness, but the cookie picked up speed, rolling right up on my heels. And before I could catapult myself onto the staircase's very first step...

I woke up.

Between the ages of four and six, my young sleeping self was transported into this penny-floored aquarium dream at least once or twice a month. My vivid yet distant memories of these recurring childhood dreams feel like representations of an ephemerally youthful phase in the development of my personal imagination, and recalling them stirs up emotions from a period of my adolescence doused in simple pleasures, senseless fears, and blissful ignorance. At six years old, my most pressing concern was how desperately I wanted these dreams to stop recurring; not because I found them to be particularly frightening, but because they were taking up my sleep space that was meant to be filled with freshly staged and excitingly unfamiliar nighttime adventures. The distinction between dreams and reality was still fairly new to me at this age, so I was especially captivated by the powerful emotions and graphic images that ran through my mind while my body remained in a state of unwavering unconsciousness. And as I've grown, so has this captivation with the enchanting experience of dreaming.

For as long as I can remember, I've been enthralled by the human psyche; so much so that I've dedicated my higher education to the pursuit of a career as a clinical psychologist. But my infatuation with dreams isn't directed towards their nuanced neurological or psychoanalytic properties, two focal points of research and literature that have historically dominated this field of study. Even as a kid who was enamored by dreams, I was never particularly interested in learning about the underlying science of their existence. Instead, I've always been transfixed by the emotionality and visuality of dreams. And more recently, it's the ineluctable uncertainty that characterizes the study of dreaming that keeps me up at night...pun intended.

Thanks to my lifelong pal named Generalized Anxiety Disorder, my fascination with inexplicable phenomena, like dreaming, has often manifested as an obsessive preoccupation with the unknown and a stinging resentment towards uncertainty. I'm inclined to believe that we as humans are all wired to feel some degree of discomfort in the presence of uncertainty, and I suspect that this discomfort acted as a catalyst for a lot of the dream focused literature I've come across. So when I committed to writing about dreams for my Capstone project, I was immediately overcome with Imposter Syndrome — Generalized Anxiety's high-achieving older sister.

For weeks I couldn't shake the feeling that it was earnestly ambitious for me to write about a topic that literally no one has ever been able to comprehensively understand or authentically articulate. I spent hours thrashing around the internet's boundless sea of dream-related content, desperate to pinpoint the curiosity that had sucked me into this whirlpool of dreaming in the first place. I ardently struggled to articulate what it was about this topic that made me feel both wistful and disheartened, with the lyrics to Rush's "Dreamline" resonating with me more than ever. Time is a gypsy caravan / Steals away in the night / To leave you stranded in dreamland. I couldn't understand how or why the unending collection of content I was encountering managed to make me feel less enlightened, and simultaneously more stranded, more alone, in my personal exploration of the topic of dreaming.

Upon confessing to my professor that I was profoundly struggling, his suggestion for me to lean into the frustration I was feeling towards my project finally stimulated the self-awareness that I hadn't yet realized I was searching for. I suddenly realized that it isn't necessarily the uncertainty of dreaming that overwhelms me with frustration, it's the certainty with which people assert their own conceptualizations of such an inherently impossible thing to explain.

In an effort to avoid merely adding to this abundance of unfounded speculation, I decided to acutely focus this project on the remarkably outlandish and individualistically abstract human experience of dreaming. So if you're like me,

eager to explore the enigmatic beauty and omnipresent allure of dreams...

continue to scroll

and join me

in dreamland.

What even is dreaming?

While this project is intended to function as a reclamation of dreaming from the cold, methodical, latex gloved grasp of the scientific research community, it would be a disservice to my readers if I refused to introduce any historical context before diving head-to-pillow first into the utterly convoluted ways that humans engage with dreams in today's modern world.

And so, I must digress.

Dreams can be a quite cumbersome and subjective phenomenon to dissect, so let’s start with the basics. Good ol’ Merriam-Webster designates three primary definitions to the word dream...

Etymologists (those linguistics nerds who study historical origins of words for a living) have determined that the word dream may stem from the Old English word drēam, used to refer to the waking sensations of “noise” and “joy,” and even “music.” While these connotations may seem to vaguely emanate some sensory characteristics of dreams, it wasn’t until the 13th century that dream began actually being used in reference to visions and sensations experienced during sleep. And from then on, the use of the word has been extended far beyond this condition of unconscious dreaming to connote a whole slew of personal elucidations. The word dream is used to describe notions like strong desires (he finally fulfilled his dream of graduating without ever purchasing a single college textbook), blissful awakened states (my fiancé proposed to me in the Walmart parking lot in Nebraska where we met...it was such a dream!), imagined fantasies (this university was built on the dreams of self-seeking, money grabbing regents), and so on.

The evolution of the word dream is not only emblematic of widely varied and infinitely eccentric human experiences; the exalted, romanticized, and often far-fetched nature of our modern use of the word dream alludes to a universal preoccupation and fascination with the dream realm and the human condition's shared experience of dreaming. The frequent and fluid integration of dreams into both colloquial and esteemed rhetoric is indicative of the way that dreams have effectively penetrated barriers that may or may not exist between sleeping and waking states of consciousness.

The science and psychology of dreaming dates all the way back to the world's earliest civilizations that anthropologists (those history dweebs who study human societies and cultures for a living) have been able to examine and investigate. As such, one of the only conclusions that can be asserted with confidence is the reality that people have been dreaming for just as long as we've been sleeping, and this nuanced understanding of dreaming as an inherent human process led to the development of distinct fields of science and psychology dedicated entirely to the incidence of dreams.

How we dream seems to be the most widely accepted ingredient of the recipe that culminates in the human experience of dreaming. Researchers have extrapolated their understanding of the sleeping brain's electrical activity to identify discrete stages of sleep that lead up to a state of rapid eye movement, or REM sleep. This inexplicable stage of sleep is characterized by, you guessed it, random and rapid movement of the eyes, as well as low muscle tone throughout the body and increases in breathing and heart rate. Upon discovering this period in which our brains are almost as active as they are when we're awake, while our physical bodies remain deeply entranced by sleep, scientists concluded that this state of unconsciousness must be where dreams are born.

At this point, it's practically impossible to dispute the unique ascendancy of dreaming as a ubiquitous feature of peoples' sleeping and waking lives. But beyond this acknowledgement of the omnipresence of dreams, there is still very little scientific consensus in terms of why we dream, and even less unanimity in discussions about the function or utility of dreams.

: a series of thoughts, visions, or feelings that happen during sleep

“He had a dream about climbing a mountain.”

“You were in my dream last night.”

: an idea or vision that is created in your imagination and that is not real

“She indulged in dreams [=fantasies] of living in a palace.”

“I've found the man/woman of my dreams.”

: something that you have wanted very much to do, be, or have for a long time

“He has had a lifelong dream of becoming an actor.”

“It's a dream of mine to own a house in the country.”

So...what is dreaming?

Welp, I guess it depends who you ask.

“We dream so we don't have to be apart so long.
If we're in each other's dreams, we can play together all night”

~Bill Watterson

calvin and hobbes comic cartoonist

But why do we care so much about dreams

if they aren’t fundamentally rooted in reality?

If you were late to work in your dream because someone replaced your car’s tires with wheels of cheese, the dream version of your boss might cut you some slack. But if you showed up late to work that following morning, in the waking world, and you tried to use this dream to reason with your boss (well, you see, in my dream last night you were quite understanding of my car troubles…), you miiight be out of a job.

The lack of tangible utility that dreams hold in our conscious lives was one of the first things that enticed me about the persistent attention that people direct towards the trivially vivid details of their dreams. This desire to not only identify, but also to remember and retell these details seems to have always been a foundational element of humans' engagement with dreaming.

Based on what we know about the way our brains function while we sleep, it's safe to assume that even our most distant ancestors must have been cozied up in their respective caves, drifting off into a dream realm flooded with animal hides, wooden lean-tos, and dirty feet. It seems that we as humans have always paid attention to the details of our dream realm experiences despite their estrangement from our waking reality, with the oldest surviving evidence of dream journaling stemming from early civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. These documentations of dream details have been uncovered within stone carvings, clay tablet cuneiform impressions, and ink writings on papyri, with official inscriptions, funerary texts, and literary archives frequently referencing the significance of dreams in governmental, religious, and everyday settings.

Anthropologists have substantially concluded that many, if not most, primal societies viewed dreams as a channel of communication between individuals and the divine spiritual world, so these early practices of dream journaling were likely incentivized by the assertion that a dream's details are representative of the dreamer's connection to divinity. I mean, if I had a dream that would lead my peers to believe I'm in communication with some higher power, you know I'd be writing that shit down in detail too.

Keeping any form of dream journal — whether it’s a Babylonian clay tablet inscribed with divine messages, a lined notebook filled with descriptive narratives, or a bulleted list of fleeting thoughts housed in the notes app on an iPhone — has been found to significantly increase dream recall. So the abiding and widespread human propensity to record our dreams is likely nothing more than an operationalization of our desire to remember them. But still, why do we spend (waste?) so much time fixating on our memories of details that have no objective utility in our waking lives?

And why do we recount these details to others?

When I initially decided to orient this project around the phenomenon of dreaming, I was stubbornly certain that feelings of disinterest and indifference are the justifiably normative responses to being retold the details of someone else's dream. The more I thought about how impossible it is to fully immerse oneself in the deeply personal dream realm of another, the more I felt convinced that people never truly care about anyones' dreams other than their own. But once I actually began to immerse myself in various avenues of dream research, I quickly determined that my initial feelings of certainty — similar to the certainty of others I've come to realize I detest — was presumptuous, narrow-minded, and oversimplified.

I personally tend not to retell my dreams to others, of course with the exception of some wild recurring ones that I had as a child (yes, I had many more than the recurring chased by a cookie dream, but do you really care to hear about them?). The only time I feel inclined to discuss a dream with someone in my waking life is when said someone played a significant role in said dream. Reflecting on the handful of occasions when I've chosen to share a dream with the real life embodiments of its characters, I can acknowledge that this inclination was predominantly influenced by my own curiosity about the roles I may play in the dreams of others.

With the intention of continuing to challenge my slightly amended yet lingering belief that no one cares about anyone else's dreams unless they make a personal appearance within their narratives, I sought out the impartial, unprimed perspectives of my friends and family.

To my delight, I came across a handful of people who expressed that they too tend to abstain from sharing their dreams, for reasons ranging from I can never really articulate what I see or how I feel in my dreams, to my dreams are so strange and scattered that other people wouldn't be able to follow along anyways. And the responses that ultimately resonated with me most were analogously emblematic of what goes on in my mind, especially while I'm sleeping, is simply nobody else's business.

Despite this spattering of people whose outlooks did in fact align with my initial assumptions, I was astounded by the variation of perspectives that characterized the vast majority of the rest of my inquiries. I was shocked by the amount of people who told me they genuinely enjoy listening to the detailed narratives of other peoples' dreams, even when they're personally absent within them, and the most prevalent explanation for this indulgence was a legitimate enthusiasm towards details that clearly felt interesting or important enough for someone else to share. Naturally, the benevolent altruism that seemed to encompass this perspective — a perspective I had previously neglected to consider — made me feel like quite the egocentric asshole.

And yet, I still couldn't get myself to abandon my pragmatic attitude towards interpersonal dream sharing. I contemplated the possibility that people only enjoy listening to dreams that are narrativized by people they care intimately about or maintain a deep relationship with, and I began to speculate that if this was true, then peoples' perceived enthusiasm towards someone else's dreams might be inadvertently misplaced.

Just like every other ostensibly groundbreaking realization I had come to thus far in my exploration of the human experience of dreaming, the internet hastily mangled my newfound relationship-dependent theory as to why people enjoy exchanging dream narratives; I stumbled upon my first of many online "dream forums." In addition to countless social media communities and Reddit sub-threads that spotlight the subject of dreaming, I discovered dozens of websites dedicated solely to the sharing of detailed dream narratives, discussed between complete strangers. Yep. Strangers.

I wasn't particularly surprised by my discovery that an abundance of dream sharing forums exist, as I've encountered quite a few obscurely niche domains throughout my years spent surfing the web. From a scholarly perspective, however, I was perplexed by this evidently widespread human desire to retell our dreams to people with whom we share absolutely no preexisting connection.

Desperate to understand this pattern of dream engagement characterized by a desire to not only share ones own dreams with strangers, but to respond to the dreams shared by random, unfamiliar people, I decided to try it for myself. To avoid the possibility that strangers might ghost me if I were to post a dream narrative to a forum online, I chose to take the in-person route. On a mundane Sunday afternoon, I approached several complete strangers as I walked around campus, enthusiastically exclaiming I had the craaaziest dream last night! followed by a wide-eyed and innocuous would you mind if I shared it with you?

Unsurprisingly, these attempts to arouse a stranger's interest in the details of my dreams were unanimously shut down; even offline, strangers were still choosing to ghost me. And honestly, my efforts to engage in impromptu interpersonal dream sharing seemed to make strangers feel the opposite of enthusiastic.

This experience induced two notable revelations: trying (and failing) to interact with strangers can definitely add a bit of spice to a mundane Sunday in Ann Arbor, and the virtual, specifically dream oriented environments of online forums likely dictate much of their popularity and utility.

After scrolling through a bizarre assortment of websites dedicated to the narrativization of dreams among strangers, I realized that the retelling of dreams accounted for less than half of the content I was coming across; the majority of these forum discussions were actually comprised of anonymous, assertive, and objective interpretations of strangers' dreams. Once I was finally able to identify objective interpretations as the priceless commodity yearned for by people who discuss their dreams with strangers, my conflicting conceptualizations of why people care so much about remembering and retelling their dreams coalesced to inform my present understanding of these engagement patterns.

Recounting the details of a dream to someone else, with shared reminiscence as the only underlying objective, seems to be somewhat anomalous. The human propensity to narrativize our dreams and discuss them with others is an act of vulnerability and candor that, more often that not, is incentivized by the expectation of a fellow human's valuable response. Why would anyone feel inclined to divulge such a deeply personal representation of their own subconscious to anyone, let alone a stranger, if they didn't anticipate receiving anything in return? Thus, dream journals and forums must just be a means to an end, with the end being the enticing possibility of enlightenment through dream interpretation.

Maybe this enthusiasm isn't actually facilitated by the dream,

but instead by a connection to the dreamer...

“The interpretation of Dreams
is the royal road to a knowledge of
the unconscious activities of the mind”

~Sigmund Freud

the founder of psychoanalysis

But why do we profoundly value dream interpretations

if they're inherently and invariably unsubstantiated?

Assigning meaning to the fleeting unconscious experiences of our dreams is a practice that humans have engaged in for centuries. Although aforementioned dream records from early civilizations are brimming with interpretive speculation, these spiritually-dominated, often supernatural interpretations are not very reminiscent of the way most people interpret dreams in the modern day.

Various sects of neurobiology and psychology have generated their own dream interpretation blueprints, but the most renowned piece of literature on the subject is arguably a book published by Sigmund Freud in 1899, conspicuously titled "The Interpretation of Dreams." Despite abounding criticism of his work's notorious hyper-sexualization of the human psyche, Freud's influence in the field of psychology fervently endures. Even my high school AP Psych teacher, who had a looong list of grievances with Freud's publications, still referred to him on our final exam as the Big Daddy of psychology.

Freud's analysis of dreams essentially defines them as representations of wishes that are yearning to be fulfilled in the waking world. While this assertion that dreams always represent repressed desires has absolutely acted as a springboard for the development of other dream interpretation strategies, most present-day interpretations are much more nuanced and individualized, extending beyond Freud's historic conceptualization of wish-fulfillment.

When I finally decided to focus my pursuit of dream related knowledge on human engagement patterns, it didn't take long for me to determine that dream interpretation is by far the most common way that people choose to engage with their dreams. Even people who lack interest in recording or retelling their dreams still seem to be drawn to the interpretation of dream details, and there wasn't a single podcast, article, or website about dreaming that I could find that didn't emphasize interpretation as the overarching "so what" of dream discussions.

It's clear that humans have an innate desire to massage meaning out of their dream experiences, but I've struggled to pinpoint the motivation behind this proclivity for interpretation. Discussing dreams with people who live drastically different waking realities has led me to an understanding that the underlying intention of interpretation is highly dependent on the perspective an individual accepts on the function of dreaming in and of itself.

For many people, culture and religion are influential determinants as to why they may feel inclined to interpret their dreams. If your cultural community defines dream realm experiences as representative visions of the future, you may attempt to interpret your dreams to better understand what lies ahead. If your religious community considers specific dreams to be indicative of the devil's wicked presence, you may interpret your dreams so as to offer prayer and seek protection from god when necessary. And if you're my atheist father, who views dreams simply as our subconsciousness' way of calling attention to relevant details of our waking realities, you may interpret your dreams as a means of determining aspects of your life that merit more intentional recognition.

Despite the variation in these perspectives, there are some astonishing narrative trends that have emerged through the widespread sharing of dreams. The discovery of these trends and the insatiable desire to understand what they mean have led people to develop an array of plot-based dream archetypes, many of which have become broadly accepted as the justifiable explanation for specific dream narratives.

I hadn't really noticed how irritated I had become by the presumptuously grandiose nature of dream interpretations until I stumbled upon a handful of podcasts that were all hosted by people who were just like me; infatuated by dreams, but grossly unqualified to be educating anyone else on the subject. And yet, these fools' podcasts were garnering audiences in the thousands, all tuning in to some stranger dissecting and interpreting the details of some other stranger's dream. I could barely make it through a dream specialist's — or even an acclaimed psychoanalyst's — interpretation of a patient's dreams without rolling my eyes at one or two of their assertions. So naturally, I was perplexed by the followings of these unprofessionally cavalier, call-in with your dreams and I'll tell you what they mean platforms of engagement.

And it wasn't until my professor urged me to lean into my frustration that I was able to identify how this haphazard prioritization of interpretation really made me feel. For some reason I was more than frustrated.

Just in case you haven't caught this vibe from me by now, I should acknowledge that I can sometimes be quick to pass judgement on the conduct of others, particularly when I find myself relating to an individual's personal experience but not to the manner with which they actively choose to respond to it. The persistence of this reprehensible character flaw likely stems from my own insecurity with the way people perceive me; a manifestation of my anxiety that presents as crippling perfectionism and excessively calculated behaviors. And so, I am keenly aware that my impassioned responses to the ways other people engage with their dreams are mostly just projections of my own vehemently pragmatic approach.

But hey, this is a safe space. I can maintain an admissible degree of shrewd judgement and self-reflection, right?

Cool cool, thanks. Moving on...

Why was I so pissed when I learned of the innumerable amount of people who rely on distant strangers to interpret their dreams? Sure, some of this agitation was directed towards the juxtaposition between amateur explanations and more psychoanalytically credible interpretations, presented by scholars who have dedicated their careers to studying dreams. But even when I listened to interpretations wherein an "expert" analyzed the dream of a stranger, I still viewed these interpretations more like generalizable horoscopes than personalized illuminations of a dreamer's subconscious.

My mind circled back to thoughts about the connection between people who exchange dream experiences and interpretations. Even though there's a lot of evidence that proves many people are comfortable sharing their dreams with those who know nothing about their waking lives, I continued to resist the possibility that the relationship between the dreamer and the interpreter truly doesn't matter.

Any dream I've ever felt the need to ask someone else's interpretive opinion on has either been exceptionally strange and somewhat embarrassing, or deeply personal and trauma inducing. I contemplated the discomfort I'd feel if someone I don't maintain a personal relationship with were to ask about the details of these dreams.

Stephanie, in all her glory, has been my therapist for almost three years now. Due to limiting global-pandemic circumstances and my out-of-state residency throughout the school year (shhhh don't tell my insurance provider), I've actually never met Stephanie in person. Despite the tele-health caveat that has rendered our communications strictly screen to screen, my girl Steph and I have cultivated an otherwise typical client to counselor relationship.

As someone who is presently training to be someone else's therapist one day, I spend a lot of time thinking about the uniqueness of these almost entirely one-sided relationships. Stephanie knows a lot about me, and I know very little about her. And from a psychotherapy best-practice perspective, that's how it's supposed to be. For all intents and purposes, Stephanie is a stranger to me...but I couldn't be farther from a stranger to her.

Thinking about peoples' relationships with their therapists has helped me to identify precisely what it is about seeking dream interpretations from strangers that gives me the heebie jeebies. It isn't the lack of a personal relationship that I find concerning about this practice, it's the lack of context.

If I were to share a dream with Stephanie in an effort to garner her professional analysis of it's contents, she may be able to provide me with an interpretation that extends beyond the narrative's archetypal meaning by using what she knows about my waking life to contextualize my unconscious experiences. But if Stephanie flipped the script and asked me to interpret one of her dreams, I'd be at a loss.

I'm still a bit bewildered by the way dreaming prompts people to divulge their unconscious thoughts and emotions with others, and I firmly believe that dream interpretation should be pursued either by the self, or by a well informed objective outsider. However, I do see now that engaging with our dreams through attempts to interpret them may be the closest we can get to understanding how our waking lives inform our unconscious experiences. Maybe if we manage to decipher the metaphorical codes within our dreams, we'll finally find use for them in reality...

Honestly,

I felt pretty pissed off.

And then, I thought of Stephanie.

“All the things one has forgotten
scream for help in dreams”

~Elias Canetti

modernist playwright

nonfiction author

novelist

All of us have had at least a few bad dreams.

"And so, when I wake up from my dreams, the pleasure is that I know that there is a world that is not this world."

Of course some people may harbor many more negative dream realm experiences than others. However, the potency of troubling, high-stress narratives within the array archetypal dream interpretations alludes to the fact that dreams of an unpleasant or distressing nature are far from uncommon.

I've had my fair share of dreams that startle me awake, directing my attention to the unwarranted physiological reactions that my body had been experiencing in response to events that weren't actually happening in the real world. Some dreams have left me doused in sweat, heart pounding ferociously within my chest, while others have literally brought me to tears, leaving me with puffy eyes and a deep pit in my stomach that often lingers throughout the following day.

As a research assistant working for a lab that studies the symptomatology of post traumatic stress disorder, I've interacted with many people whose dream realm experiences serve to perpetuate their trauma rather than act as an escape from its weighty presence in their conscious reality. I was exposed to the prevalence of this concern among people diagnosed with PTSD during my first set of pre-screen phone calls with potentially eligible study participants; as I ran through the medication review portion of the recruitment process, almost every participant I pre-screened indicated that they take between 1 - 15 mg of prazosin every night. Prazosin is technically a antihypertensive drug and urinary retention medication, but it has also been found to reduce the severity and frequency of nightmares associated with PTSD.

Though nightmares have certainly felt jarring and poignant for me, the extent and impact of my bad dreams is certainly far lesser than that of people who truly endure trauma-induced night terrors. To better understand this territory of dreaming that remained uncharted for me, I decided to speak to my lifelong best friend Dana about her dream realm experiences.

Dana has been my best friend for over twenty years, ever since we met during preschool rugtime at age two. When we were six years old, Dana's father was killed in a shockingly fatal boat accident in Maui. Along with at least 50 other tourists, Dana, her two brothers, and her mother were all rescued before the whale-watching catamaran they were on began to sink into the ocean. Coast Guard officials at the scene reported that rough ocean conditions, with 6-foot waves and winds at 20 to 30 mph, had led to the snapping of the ship's mast, and the subsequent death of my best friend's dad.

Pervasively vivid memories of the horrifying accident that took her father's life have caused a myriad of mental health challenges for Dana, many of which are direct reverberations of her PTSD. And one of the very first indicators of Dana's PTSD symptom onset was her inability to sleep through the night. For years she would eagerly ask to sleepover at my house, only to wake my parents up between 2 and 4 am, begging them to drive her home. Dana's trauma managed to penetrate the barrier between her conscious and unconscious states, and she has been grappling with the presence of night terrors for around fifteen years now.

When we were young, Dana would tell me that all she wanted was to get the dreams that reminded her of her dad's death out of her head. But when I asked her about these nightmares in an effort to explore the way she engages with them now, her response was quite different.

I proceeded to ask Dana to share with me some of the details that she remembers as reminiscent of her nightmares.

I then asked her about the ways in which she has historically reacted to these particular dreams.

Dana went on to discuss how she thinks about these dreams, and how her perceptions of her trauma related dreams, and dreaming in general, have also developed with age.

I asked Dana to elaborate further on the comment she made about being urged to associate her dreams with her trauma when she was a child.

Dana's journey towards understanding how her dreams inform her mental health and real life experiences is representative of the way many people therapeutically learn to cope with their recurring nightmares. However, I've found that many people address dreams that are particularly frightening through an entirely different pattern of dream engagement, one that was actually the very first thing about dreaming that left me feeling desperate to learn more about.

I was first introduced to the concept of lucid dreaming in 2017, by an old friend who was personally infatuated by the possibility of entering and controlling their own dreams. The late night conversations I had with this friend on the porch of our overnight camp cabin, and Christopher Nolan's Inception, of course, were pretty much the extent of my exposure to lucid dreaming prior to the emergence of this project.

I decided to reach out to this old friend who I had grown to associate fondly with the transcendental nature of dreams, and despite years having passed since the last time we spoke, they enthusiastically agreed to speak with me about their experiences with lucidity within the dream realm. And since I'm still unfortunately quite unacquainted with this form of dream engagement, I'll share some of my friend's experiences on the subject of controlling and entering dreams.

Discussing the details of my friend's lucid dream experiences served as the first of two enlightening conversations I had on the subject. The second was a discussion I had with my professor that turned out to be the most enriching — and undoubtedly the most baffling — exposure I've had to someone's personal perspective on the dream realm.

So as not to butcher his articulations of such an atypical experience, I'll let my professor's own words speak for themselves.

The indirect exposure to dream lucidity that I was lucky enough to gain from my professor and my friend has entirely redefined for me what lucid dreaming is all about. I used to think of lucid dreaming as a sort of party trick that people teach themselves in an effort to micromanage the intricate details and events of their dreams. But now, I see lucidity as more of a perspective shift than a shift in control, and I've come to think about lucid dreaming simply as a means of introducing consciousness into a routinely unconscious space, essentially diminishing the subconscious's pre-existing autonomy over the dream realm.

The otherworldly yet real-life feelings that dreams evoke seem to be amplified by the addition of lucidity; maybe if everyone had the natural ability to become lucid in their dreams, they would be content experiencing them as they are, eliminating the insatiable desire to embed them into our waking world. Lucid dreaming — as a natural occurrence and an attainable skill — certainly introduces powerful new opportunities for people to actively engage with their dreams...but at what cost?

Enduring lucidity has effectively transformed my professor's perspective on the dream realm, but his circumstance has also significantly altered the way he experiences waking reality. My professor's inability to sleep and dream without remaining lucid has entirely altered his sense of time, making everything that happens in his life feel like it just happened. He therefore never feels incentivized by the passage of time, and can no longer experience the sensation of missing someone. When people respond with envy to his distinctively peculiar condition of conscious unconsciousness, my professor often ends up responding:

So clearly, there must be some underlying necessity to the way most humans dream. Mythbusting my own misconceptions about lucid dreaming feels like a step in the right direction towards more authentically understanding how subjective and individualistic the human experience of dreaming really is. And though many, many questions remain unanswered in my exploration of this topic, I guess it would have been ignorantly optimistic for me to have expected this project to go any other way.

Despite our most valiant efforts to memorialize dreams throughout our waking lives, the experience of dreaming will always exist exclusively within the unconscious abyss of our very own dream realms. We as humans simultaneously pay too much and not enough attention to the utter strangeness of our dreams, and to the process of dreaming as a whole. By fixating on minutiae and meaning, maybe we're misdirecting our attention altogether; maybe dreams are simply meant to be engaged with through shared human expressions of uncertainty, perplexity, astonishment, and reverence.

On our last day of class, a member of my Capstone workshop group brought a concept of quantum physics to my attention that has helped me come to terms with my feelings regarding the overall experience of creating this project.

The "Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle" essentially states that there is a fundamental limit to what one can know about a quantum system; the more precisely one knows a particle's position, the less one can know about its momentum, and vice versa.

Fixating on my frustration with the unknown will only give it more power over me, reducing the benefits of exploration and connection that uncertainty can encourage. So if nothing else, at least I've learned to lean into my frustration, as opposed to pushing against it.

Maybe the fact that I may never find an answer to my questions is the answer I've been searching for all along.

"I try to remember my dreams in the greatest detail I can so I can attempt to make sense of them."

"When I do have trauma related dreams, they're directly correlated with water, and waves, and panic. Within these dreams, I feel the same physical sensations that I remember feeling the day of the accident"

"When I was younger, I used to wake up and feel as though I could see things around my room that had been present in my nightmares. But as I've gotten older, I've become more aware of my own emotions and how they may impact my dreams, so this no longer happens to me anymore. I do still feel unsettled throughout the mornings, though, when I wake up from a dream that seems to somehow represent my trauma."

"I think I have a tendency to take any fearful dream and associate it with my fears as a child, and maybe this is because growing up I was always told to associate my nightmares with my trauma. But over time, I've come to see my dreams as representations of my current states of stress, which often involve family or relationship issues. I believe my dreams relate to all of my struggles, not just the biggest or most impactful ones. And as I've gotten older, I've tried to stop forcing connections between my dreams and issues I've experienced in my real life."

"Whenever I've asked my therapists for their insight on my nightmares, they've explained how my dreams could be manifestations of my past. But I've found that good therapists don't really try to interpret my dreams for me, but more so try to engage me in behavior chain analysis so I can develop a clearer insight into how I feel about my dreams."

Lucid dreaming.

"Maybe the reason I've been so obsessed with dreams all this time is because of my natural ability to become lucid within them. And since lucid dreaming was pretty effortless for me, I guess I never really felt that strong desire to control my dreams like some other people do. Well actually, I went through a phase that just recently stopped, of constantly having really vivid nightmares. This had been going on like, for years, I would say about three years, and for whatever reason the nightmares kinda just stopped for me within the last few months. But when I was having those nightmares, that was the first time I tried so hard to practice gaining lucidity, so that I could try to switch the narrative. But my lucidity always happens without the explicit thought of like hmmm am I in a dream right now? and I don't even really ever have the thought of like, oh, I'm actively dreaming right now. I more so have the realization that I'm in the dream realm, and in the dream realm different physics apply, so I can do things differently..."

"Whenever I would actually try to lucid dream, it would work less than if it just happened without me trying...so I've really never actively tried to be lucid or even had the urge or will to do it, except for when I was having those constant nightmares. And like I said, it didn't work when I was trying too hard to think about becoming lucid...and actually, naturally becoming lucid in my nightmares didn't even help me to moderate the fear that these dreams caused me, because I'd still experience these dreams in the first person, and even when I've used my lucidity to really try to avoid scary things, if I was already feeling fear when I became lucid, that fear was still as real as it would be in my real life, you know, like just because I’m able to realize its occurring in a dream doesn't make it feel any less scary in the moment."

"I remember the exact moment that I first became lucid in a dream when I was a child. I would keep getting these dreams of being chased by people. And in one dream, these people that were chasing me were getting close, and I thought I always run so slowly, I need a new plan. So then I just jumped up into the air and I started swimming in the sky instead, maybe out of instinct since I've been a swimmer all my life. I was able to move so much faster that way, and I was like oh shit, I can actually do this, and from then on, for me, that's how I become lucid. I guess ever since that moment I've always been aware that I'm able to fly in my dreams, but I never made the connection of like, oh, if I'm flying it must mean that I'm dreaming, until kind of recently. And now, whenever I fly, I'm able to pretty quickly realize I'm in a dream."

"From talking to other lucid dreamers, it seems like everyone has their own unique indicators that trigger their lucidity. So literally the only thing that seems to make me become lucid, it's not looking at the sky or looking at my hands, which are some more common reality checks, it's always been being able to fly. So like, when I become lucid, usually I'll be flying in my dream and the I'm like, oh, I must be in the dream realm because I can only fly here. You know that moment as soon as you're completely immersed underwater and you're aware that the physics of that space are totally different? It's kind of like, it's like this realization of oh, this is not what I can normally do. So I guess becoming lucid in my dreams has made me see dreaming completely as its own state, just like how walking is parallel to swimming, dream realm experiences are parallel to real life experiences. In my waking world I've never thought that I've been in a dream, but I've definitely thought that I'm in the real world while dreaming, which is so interesting to me. When I'm lucid in a dream, it's the same for me as being lucid in real life."

"And for me, lucid dreaming has never allowed me to change or control the narratives of my dreams, but more-so just my behavior within these narratives. For example, if someone was chasing me, and I knew that I was dreaming because I was flying, I couldn't make them not chase me. All I could do is be like okay, I can take this route because I can fly now and I can move faster and farther because I can fly now."

"I think a big misconception about lucid dreaming is that it's a way to gain control over every aspect of your dreams. At least for me, becoming lucid in the dream realm just allows me to look at and think about my dreams more clearly, or at least with some perspective in the moment instead of after the fact, when I'm already awake in reality. The real world is just made up of us all having our own personal experiences, and a dream is definitely a personal experience, it just plays out in a different space. So really, when you can be lucid in both of these spaces, there's no distinction. There's no like, lesser experience, you know? Maybe that's why people who become lucid in their dreams tend to care about them so much, or why people who are interested in the dream realm but can't figure out what to do with their dreams try to learn how to become lucid themselves."

"Narratively speaking, while I am dreaming the dreams are narratively complete. In other words, I am entering a complete life. So while I am dreaming, I know what the he, the dreamer, right, the figure in the dream, knows. But I also know what I know. So I know what he knows, but he doesn't know what I know. So I am both the reader of the dream, and the main character."

"Sometimes, you know, typical fantasy or stereotypically fantastical things happen, but mainly my dreams are very much like waking life, just in a completely different narrative setting. Then, when they're over, I am immediately conscious. I'm fully awake."

"The primary difference for me is that when I had dreams like a normal person, those dreams were like bubbles that collapsed. So like, their oddness, their temporarity, their fragility, all in collapsing bubbles. And so they were hard to grasp, and they were evanescent and ephemeral. But now when I experience a dream, I'm experiencing a slice of time in something that, for all the world, feels like it preceded me and will follow and will exist after me. That world that I am stepping into, it feels complete, because it is complete. I'm stepping into it with all of that texture, right, and when I leave it and wake up to this waking world, it feels like it goes on."

"Part of the consciousness of the dream is aware of patterns of persistence, but the context of the dream itself is not aware of those things, and so, even if I never revisit that channel, there's a very strong sensation that the world of the channel persists. So my dreams do not feel like things that arise from within me, or things that are occurring to me, they feel like things that I am actually entering. I close my eyes to this world, I opened my eyes, it is another world that is no less complete than this world. I close my eyes to that world, and I wake up in this one. So I yo-yo. I always go back to the place I began, but the place I go to is a complete place that I probably will never re-enter, but it isn't less complete because I’ve left it."

"When this all started to occur, it was very exhausting. Because I'd come to depend, like most people depend, on that sense of darkness or oblivion, or erasure, to reset. Of course, all the neurologists were fascinated. This was not supposed to happen. We did all kinds of sleep studies and all kinds of imaging studies...and the strangest thing is that I'm not failing to go through the normal stages of sleep, right, because if that were the case there would be a serious physiological consequence. Like you can't not do that, that will, you know, harm you. So what they can't figure out is whether or not I'm effectively dreaming in a stage of sleep that is not associated with dreaming, or if there is something that occurs outside of a dream state that is very radically affecting how I experience the dream state."

"But this is all just guessing, right, they can't get in there and figure any of this out, it's all descriptive. So the gap between what they can measure and what they understand is huge, and the most conspicuous thing about my measurements is that my deep sleep stages have about the amplitude as consciousness. Which is the closest explanation they have for why I feel like I am essentially awake when I'm asleep."

"But here's what doesn't happen for me. So you're aware, I assume, in your active sleeping, of periods of erasure...blank spots where it's not a dream, but you also aren't awake. I no longer have that temptation at all. So there is no darkness, and there is no interruption."

"You know the exhaustion that comes from watching too much TV, when you binge something and that binge gets to be exhausting. But sometimes, you can refresh yourself by changing the channel. So the idea that you can have a reset that involves blankness or darkness or time off or oblivion, I no longer have access to that. All I can do is change the channel. Changing the channel is the most rest that sleep now offers me. So the only thing restorative about sleep for me is an alternate narrative, not a sense of erasure when I'm awake."

"And there's something about it I can't describe, that is so unbelievably emotionally rich because of that feeling, because of that sense of durability and persistence. So if something very bad has happened or, like, I'm having a really bad day thinking about politics, for whatever that period of time is that I'm dreaming, I'm in a place where those events did not occur. And it doesn't mean that it's a utopia, right, because sometimes yes, very terrible and stressful things happen and I don't want to revisit that world ever again. But still, it is not this world, and so whatever is burdensome about this world is always removed by the act of dreaming."

"How would you feel if your eyes never got dry, but you still weren't allowed to blink ever again?"