How active dreaming has made me happier and smarter
I use to think of sleeping as a waste of time.
Naah…who am I kidding?
I’ve always enjoyed sleeping. As a student, however, I didn’t allow myself to do it as much as I wanted to. University, social media, and work environments (especially in STEM) created, some in a more subtle way than others, a myth suggesting that success is inversely related to hours of sleep (see the diagram below).
In some periods of my life, I would sleep as little as 3 to 4 hours per day, and not even continuously, but taking naps between studying hours and the whole lot of things that I use to do (and some of them I still do): music, martial arts, volunteer work, part-time jobs, etc.
But I won’t go into the details here. Many of us have been overloaded, burned out, trying to fill our days with “wellness” habits while the problem can be summarized to (Warning: oversimplification): we barely leave time to enjoy ourselves without any other purpose than just being right here, right now.
I understand that the contexts underlying the decision to have an overburdened life can vary widely, ranging from systemic/structural reasons to very specific situations such as having to care for someone with a disability.
In my case, I was obsessed with the idea of excelling at everything and always looking for someone else’s approval. Two years ago, I decided to not care anymore about other’s people definitions of success and follow my own way. This meant, among other things, having enough time for leisure and sleep.
Since I was a kid, I’ve always thought a lot about my dreams. And by ‘dreams’ I don’t mean desires or expectations about the future, but the literal meaning of the word: the experiences you have while you’re asleep. I emphasize the word ‘experience’ because to me, a dream can be just as real and valuable for learning as a waking life experience. The fact that is only happening in my brain doesn’t make it less real or embodied.
When I was in school I had a friend who would tell me about incredible adventures that happened to her in her dreams. Every time she told me one, I thought “I wanna dream like that”. And that wish was responsible for the real magic to begin: just by thinking about my dreams more actively (e.g., sharing them with my friends and family, writing them down), they became more vivid.
In the following years, my dreams grew in complexity alongside my ability to remember them. I went from having blurry memories of absurd situations to these really creative, intricate, and intellectually stimulating experiences.
Although I’ve been familiar with ‘active dreaming’ for 7+ years (I make a distinction with lucid dreaming, which is a practice that I have not yet mastered), I only started to see true ‘outcomes’ when I had more hours of sleep.
In these last two years of active dreaming, I’ve made some observations that I want to share in this post, and perhaps make a small contribution to the abolition of the myth of the inverse correlation.
Dreams are the most spontaneous creations of our minds.
When we are dreaming, we are less bound to prejudges and rational filters than we are in waking life. Therefore our actions and feelings are intimately connected with our true desires, fears and perceptions, without the bias of fulfilling reality’s expectations.
But let’s stop here. I don’t want to expand on theorizations that by the way have already been brilliantly made by others. Following Fritz Perls’ recommendation, I try to interpret my dreams the least possible.
One practical outcome of this observation is understanding that everything that happens in our dreams is a part of ourselves. If we are capable of truly understand this, we have had discovered an inexhaustible source of self-knowledge.
Another consequence of this spontaneity is that we tend to be more creative in our dreams. Great discoveries and masterpieces have been first conceived in dreams (I wish that list had more women, but you know, patriarchy…).
You don’t have to be a great scientist or genius artist to harness these benefits. Sometimes I go to bed with a problem, maybe an algorithmic problem, a bug that I couldn’t fix, a melody that is hard for me to play... And when I wake up, I know I’ve been thinking it over during the night, studying it, learning it. There are times when the answer comes in very explicitly, i.e.: I can see myself playing what I thought was too hard, or I can see the solution for that coding challenge I couldn’t solve. Some other times the dream is more abstract or cryptic, but in either case, I feel happy knowing that my sleep hours are not a waste of time, but the total opposite.
Of course, this counts for interpersonal problems too. Some of the most difficult conversations I’ve ever had, I’ve rehearsed first in my sleep.
Last but not least, sometimes a dream forces me to become aware of an issue that I was totally overlooking. In these cases, the dream does not point to the answer, but to the problem itself.
There is a time dilation between the oniric and the ‘real’ clock.
When we are dreaming, the feeling of time is totally different, and that is one of the traits I most enjoy and profit from.
Sometimes I wake up with memories of an entire day or even two days in which I talked to people, played music, ate, coded, went to places, etc. In some of these dreams, I even go to bed and wake up the next morning within the same dream… Yep, I live my own Inception movie.
We don’t even dream the entire time we are asleep. REM sleep is the stage of sleep in which we are most likely to dream, and for most adults, it takes out about 20 to 25 percent of our sleep. If you sleep 8 hours per night as I do, that’s no more than 2 hours of REM. However, we can have rich and prolonged experiences within that time.
Just imagine how we can boost our learning and creativity if we take hold of this neurological curiosity. I know nothing replaces waking life, but if sleeping is a biological need, let’s make it worth it!
It’s always a game… and the best games are the most serious ones.
Warning: biased example…patriarchy again.
As a kid, I took my games very seriously. If I played my doll’s mother, I wouldn’t leave my character until the game was over. I knew my doll was not a real person, but within the limits of the game, she was. Moreover, the game was a totality in itself, as means and ends were one and the same thing.
When we play, we play in order to play, not to accomplish anything, but that’s no reason to not take it seriously.
I don’t dream intensely all the time. There was a time when I was very devoted to my dreaming life and I would wake up every morning with at least 4 or 5 stories. As I tried to write all of them down, I eventually became anxious and tired of dreaming that much. It was not a game anymore, so I decided to take it easy again.
Nowadays my dreaming is more cyclic, as I go from very prolific periods (3–4 dreams per night) to periods in which I just remember one dream per night or none at all.
No matter which phase I am in, I enjoy it and learn from it. Dreaming is a true gift of nature. We can use it to understand ourselves better, push our learning limits, or simply stop feeling that sleeping is a necessary evil.
There are plenty of resources out there on how to improve the quality of your sleep. Topics range from meditation, diet, sleep hygiene habits, and so on. My advice: whatever you do, never forget it’s all a game. Have fun with it, enjoy it, and take it seriously.
If this article made you want to start sleeping more and actively dreaming, please feel free to like and comment. I’d be happy to read about your experiences!