With six months left until my wedding, my dream world has been hijacked by wilted bouquets, screaming bridesmaids, and missing officiants. Last night I dreamed my guests were furious that I had secretly married before the ceremony. The night before, a band played so loudly that no one could hear my vows.

My dress has been — in various dreams — ill-fitting, wet, blue, sequined, ripped, stolen, and indecently short.

Every action, it seems, really does have an equal and opposite reaction. The sweeter the waking hours spent choosing flowers and tasting cake, the scarier the dreams that arrive once I fall asleep. They started, right on cue, two days after I got engaged, and show no sign of stopping.

I’m not alone, apparently. Brides gather in wedding planning forums and Reddit threads to share their nightmares. The online publication Brides runs features to help worried readers cope with these intrusions. Scientific studies back up these anecdotal accounts. Academics in California analyzed dreams from thousands of people and found that women not only had far more wedding dreams than men, but the weddings they dreamed about often went wrong.

Planning stress explains the details, but not the dread.

On average, women spend 528 hours planning for their wedding. It may therefore make sense to explain these dreams through the Continuity Hypothesis. That’s the idea that how you spend your day tends to show up in your dreams the following nights. If you spend your day worrying your tailor won’t finish your alterations in time, the theory goes, you are far more likely to dream about getting married in a dress that’s too big.

Beneath this sensible logic lies a gnawing suspicion: What if these dreams know something I don’t?

For most of us, choosing a spouse is one of the single biggest determinants of happiness. Saying yes to the right proposal, or no to the wrong one, influences our wealth, productivity, and health. A disastrous wedding is an expensive disappointment, but a misjudged marriage will ruin your life. Bad wedding dreams disturb us not because they may foreshadow a poorly planned event, but because we suspect they could warn against wedlock altogether.

Brides-to-be have long looked to dreams for answers.

This idea — that dreams should guide marital decisions — is an old one. Parts of Britain celebrated the Eve of St Agnes until the early 19th century. Unmarried women believed that if they performed certain rituals, they would dream of their future husbands on the night of January 20th. Some recited the Lord’s Prayer whilst moving pins from a cushion to a sleeve. Others ate a piece of dumb cake, baked in total silence with friends. In Scotland, they threw grain onto the ground whilst praying “Agnes, sweet and Agnes fair, Higher higher, now repair; Bonny Agnes, let me see, the lad who is to marry me.”

You can find similar myths and customs everywhere. In Victorian England, women hid cake under their pillows to summon insight. In Russia, it was tiny bridges made of twigs. In Ireland, nine ivy leaves. In 19th-century Arabia and India, instead of sleeping on charms, parents practiced dream incubation to identify wise matches for their children.

These folk traditions can seem quaint or outdated in modern wedding planning. Amid piles of vendor contracts to comb through, RSVPs to chase, and difficult bridal party members to wrangle and placate, there is little time for old customs. We still hear echoes of old wives’ tales when brides pick out their “something blue” and when grooms carry their partner over the threshold of their new home. We’ll let them hover on the outskirts of our day, but taking them seriously would seem bizarre.

These rituals are an assertion of autonomy

Dismissing these rituals misses their practical value. In other parts of the world, they live on. In 2014, anthropologists visited women in northern Morocco and found that if a woman claimed to have received insight from her dreams, her community respected the decision she made as a result. In some cases, a woman’s dream legitimized her choice of partner, even when her parents disagreed. For these women, dreams offered a chance to shape their own future. Framing a choice as a dream granted it authority.

St Agnes’ story, too, is one of self-determination. Despite her later involvement in the dreams and spells of young women hoping for marriage, Agnes never married. In fact, she never even wanted to marry. She chose Christian piety, seeking celibacy over wedlock. As a result, she was betrayed by an angry suitor whose proposal she had rejected, and put to death.

Her sainthood was granted not because she was a matchmaker or wife, but because she chose to govern the course of her own life.

The rituals we have forgotten, and the dreams many of us try to suppress, don’t offer secret wisdom from deities or long-dead saints. They urge us to listen to our own intuition and own our decisions, however illogical they may seem on the surface.

Our wedding dreams were never about the groom

If our pre-marital dreams are supposed to whisper clues about the suitability of our future partners, then they’re definitely failing to deliver. Reviewing my own collection and those shared by other women, one thing is very obviously missing. The groom is nowhere to be found. If he shows up at all, he’s a background character, milling around in the corner of our eye or fading into a crowd. For a day defined by coupledom, the stressed bride is surprisingly alone.

That’s because these dreams, and the folklore around them, have always been more about the dreamer than the future husband. Read that way, the nightmares are a ritual in their own right: a nightly check-in, asking whether this is still what we want. They remind us that the real nightmare isn’t a poorly planned wedding day, or even a marriage that doesn’t turn out the way we hoped.

The real nightmare is realizing, when the license is signed and the guests long gone, that we said yes to everyone but ourselves.

Medium Day is a free online gathering on September 18th. Register now to explore over 100 sessions, including mine. I look forward to seeing you at “Collective dreams as strategic intelligence: The only data source that matters in 2026” from 4:00 PM — 4: 30PM PDT.

Every night, each one of the 8.3 billion humans on the planet dreams around five dreams. That’s 41 billion data points that are created every 24 hours. Most are forgotten or ignored.

When untangled, these stories contain clues about the dreamer’s hopes, beliefs, fears, and identity. They can tell us how someone spent their day yesterday, and how they’re likely to spend their day tomorrow.

“In the act of going to sleep we undress not only physically but psychically as well. When our brain gets a signal to start dreaming, there we are in our emotional nudity.” — Montague Ullman

The field of dream science is exploding. The convergence of big data analysis methodologies, advances in psychology, and public collaboration in dream sharing is quickly confirming what people have suspected for millennia: Dreams are our most valuable source of insight.

Despite their (deceptively!) nonsensical appearance, dreams can reveal:

- Whether a hopeful single will find love in the next three months

- If a laid-off worker is coping well with unemployment

- How likely a social media user is to be a psychopath

- Which presidential candidate a voter favors

If you want to understand the people around you, the fastest way to the truth is through their dreams.

Old data

Dream data is one of the oldest forms of information we have. Some evolutionary psychologists think we began sharing it with one another in 40,000 BC — around the same time early humans started cave painting. By the 4th century BC, the ancient Greeks were compiling primitive dream databases. You can still read their dream reports, inscribed onto stone tablets, if you visit the small city of Epidaurus.

Our ideas about where dreams come from, and how they should be interpreted, have shifted and changed since our ancestors gathered around the fireplace 42 thousand years ago. What has not changed is our recognition that they contain knowledge about the world that we are not consciously aware of.

“The dreamer can recognize deep down, what the system is really like.” — Bruno Bettelheim

New perspectives

For all the things our predecessors got right about dreams, they made one critical error. A dream does not make sense in isolation. The signals in dream data are reliable, but faint. Only when we amplify their power through scale can we capture their value.

Today there are hundreds of ways to gather and work with other people’s dreams. One in five dreamers record their dreams, and thousands are posted online. Nine percent of people have taken actions as drastic as quitting a job or buying a house because of a dream, and more than half have had dreams that challenge their worldview.

Dreamers want to share their dreams, and I hope, after joining my session, you will want to listen.

Medium Day is a free online gathering on September 18th. Register now to explore over 100 sessions, including mine. I look forward to seeing you at “Collective dreams as strategic intelligence: The only data source that matters in 2026” from 4:00 PM — 4: 30PM PDT

My colleague’s emails used to be scruffy, typo-ridden chaos. Her thoughts flooded into my inbox like real-time monologues. Sometimes the half-formed ideas would have been persuaded to sit in bullet points, giving the ramblings the illusion of structure. Often I’d wake up to two or three, sent in succession before I could respond, the later ones adding and correcting their predecessors.

She would always apologize, repeatedly and needlessly, for the mess — aware that she did not live up to business school etiquette around professional correspondence. I loved her communication; I could see how her theories were building, the evidence sources that were stacking up to form the foundations of her conclusion.

But mostly I loved her mess because it invited my own, not-yet-perfect, likely flawed, collaboration. There is no innovation without intimacy.

Two years ago something started to change. First the typos disappeared, then odd sentence structures and clean formatting — the hallmarks of AI chatbots. Her thoughts were still there, but the color had drained out. More recently, she has begun forwarding direct PDF print-outs from Claude’s response to her prompt. I wonder if she might soon start sending her digital avatar to our weekly meetings in her place.

“As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.” — Ernst Fischer

This shift is not confined to my colleague. Researchers at the University of Southern California recently looked at 880,000 texts. They found that since we started using AI to help us write, diversity in our styles has decreased by up to 50%. Other academics think AI’s dulling impact might go beyond communication, arguing that it could fundamentally change the way we experience the world. AI lets us create the illusion of having thought deeply about a topic, without actually having thought deeply at all. It provides neatly packaged output and summaries, whilst congratulating us for our great question.

In this new, digitally optimized world, we are never challenged, never experience frustration, uncertainty, or fulfillment. Our output is perfectly good-enough, but devoid of meaning.

By now, we’re all well-versed in the headline dangers of AI. Experts agree that these risks include it gaining dangerous capabilities, economic pressure to deploy unsafe systems, the development of new weapons, power centralization, and the spread of misleading information. Next to these apocalyptic terrors, my discomfort with missing typos in my colleague’s emails seems frivolous.

In any case, the decision to AI-polish my thoughts is out of my hands. Bloomberg reports that in some industries, the lay-off risk for workers reluctant to use AI is triple that of their AI-enthusiastic peers. The consultancy firm Accenture has been clear: AI-luddites will be the first to go. A discrimination lawsuit brought by former Meta employees claims the tech giant already uses AI as a productivity metric. As sad as my co-workers’ emails made me feel, against the hard-nosed logic of the workforce efficiency KPI dashboard, she was making the smartest choice.

It was around the same time my colleague abandoned her own voice entirely in favor of Claude’s print-outs that my crow nightmares started. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. In the dream, I’m running around town whilst crows drown in puddles. They’re dead, but the currents of water cause their legs to move. The illusion of life is the worst part. I want to tell someone, or help them, but I’m disgusted and scared.

I’m far from the only one playing out the challenges of our AI-world during the night. One in five of us has had a dream like this. Elon Musk — co-founder of OpenAI, CEO of SpaceXAI, and creator of the chatbot Grok says he has recurrent nightmares about the technology his own businesses have developed.

“I’ve had AI nightmares many days in a row… what am I supposed to do about it?” — Elon Musk

I wondered if I should feed my crow nightmare into ChatGPT. This is, increasingly, our first action when we wake from puzzling dreams. According to psychologists at Swansea University, the chatbots generally provide good-enough interpretations. When participants were asked to provide the AI with their dream, along with information about their waking life and their own ideas about the dream, they rated the AI’s output as reasonably helpful. Ambitious researchers elsewhere claim that AI might soon revolutionize the way we understand our dreams, with groups promising progress in precognitive abilities and video replay of dreams.

Despite its scientifically proven interpretation skills, I was reluctant to trust the chatbot with my drowning crows. I couldn’t face one more congratulatory, reasonably helpful, em-dash-overloaded response.

Walking in a park near my home on the outskirts of San Francisco, in one of the few cell phone service dead zones, I found an unofficial letterbox on the ground. It was too far from a house, or business, or road to be visited by the mail service. In search of answers, I scribbled down my crow dream on paper and pencil and popped it inside, asking for help.

Three days later, I collected my answer from the letter box.

The stranger's words were smudged, and they couldn't claim, like their digital chatbot competitor, to have synthesized billions of data points across the internet before drafting his reply.

It was, however, the first thing I’d read all month that made me feel human.

I dreamed that some old friends had made a book. It was filled with unflattering photos of me, and a bar chart showing the results of a survey about me. All the responses had been critical. I left the party and found a colleague. I was crying, and he looked uncomfortable and ignored me.

Most autistic women don’t get diagnosed until adulthood

Like 80% of women with autism, I managed to sneak into adulthood undetected. My decades of deception may be attributed to society’s difficulties in spotting the symptoms in little girls. Boys are 10 times more likely to be tested than girls.

I want to take some credit too. My orchestra of careful masking and mimicking burned me out, but I likely avoided some of the penalties faced by my identified autistic friends.

“It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.” — D. W. Winnicott

Autism is a developmental difference that shapes how a person experiences the world. It changes how they process information and communicate. Social cues, sensory input, and unspoken expectations can feel unclear or overwhelming. Direct language and predictable structure often help. Around 2% of people have autism, but many are never diagnosed. Autism is one form of neurodiversity. That’s a term that recognises natural variation in how human brains develop and function.

After years of successful undercover work, I have now, like an increasing number of adults, finally faced the diagnostic music. The numbers are in, and the jig is up. With that comes the relief of excusing myself from the exhaustion of pretending. Permission to turn down social invitations. Permission to turn away from the intense eye contact that acquaintances confuse with politeness.

It has also brought with it an avalanche of nighttime dreams like this one. Confusing social judgment, an objective but opaque failure to meet the standard.

Late diagnosis forces a re-write of our story

Autism is mostly genetic, which means it’s been with me all my life. The ideas I had about myself- about my skills, personality flaws, and friendships needs to be, if not rewritten, then heavily reviewed.

I had always considered myself overly sensitive to interpersonal conflict. Imagining rejection where there was none. But perhaps my gut had been right.

Science paints a tricky picture of discrimination. Non-autistic people rate autistic people as 29% less likable. Experiments appear to show that they’re less likely to want to talk to autistic people, and less likely to want to be their friend. Even playground bullies seem primed to spot autism. Victimization likelihood is higher for autistic children. It’s not surprising that autistic people often expect a negative response from strangers.

“When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul.” ― Jean Rhys

I am left combing through old memories and old photos, wondering if I had remembered each school teacher, party, boyfriend, job, as it had truly been.

Had I masked enough for them to like me, or so much that they hadn’t even known me?

Dreams deliver clarity when the world is chaotic.

I have spent much of my life in a private world. Monitoring my face and my words from the inside out. Retreating when the world was too intense. We know autistic people are likely to spend more time in immersive daydreams. These are very vivid waking dreams, with plots that can be revisited again and again. Some researchers think this might be a way to explore emotions creatively. In a way that avoids the judgment that can come from conversations with non-autistic people. Maybe for similar reasons, autistic people also seem especially drawn to fantasy media.

As well as exploration and retreat, immersive daydreams might be a way for autistic people to reason. We are learning that they approach cognitive tasks differently from non-autistic people. For example, they have incredibly strong, visual mental representations. They can see concepts clearly in their mind’s eye, and many rely on this way of thinking to process information.

Another skill that seems to come more easily to autistic people is pattern recognition. Some autistic people say they see patterns not just in images, but in music, numbers, or facial expressions. It’s like accessing the underlying system, the mechanics linking everything together.

“Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.” — Virginia Woolf

Nighttime dreams accelerate this pattern recognition benefit for me. Dreams are a place to reflect on what’s happened during waking life, and prepare for what might be coming next. We generally dream about things we have been doing or thinking about during the day. Importantly, scientists now believe that these daytime memories are reorganised during sleep. Linked together to give new insight and clarity. Transforming the messy overload of daytime information into digestible stories.

Dreams give us a language for connection.

Of the gifts offered by a dream, the most important might actually come when we wake up and tell it to another person. Autistic people are generally lonelier than non-autistic people. There are many reasons for this gap. For some, it’s needing more time alone to recharge. For others, sensory overload in the types of places people socialise is a problem. Often, communication differences add to the struggle.

Dream sharing offers a solution. After you share a dream with someone, empathy between the two of you increases by 9%. Sharing a dream with someone gives them a clear view into your internal world. For me, they are a chance to connect with other people without the often incomprehensible rules of social interaction. When I can express my emotions and ideas in a way that makes sense to me, communication challenges disappear.

A team of psychotherapists in New York experimented with this technique for autistic teenagers. The group had been limited to one-word answers when they only talked about waking experiences. But it transformed when dreams were allowed in. A young man explained he was abducted by aliens and taken to their planet. He wasn’t scared; he just wanted to understand the aliens. Through this story, and the discussion that followed, he was able to communicate his feelings of alienation. And give his peers an opportunity to express their own.

“I wasn’t failing to be a person. I was succeeding at being autistic.” — Fern Brady

Some of us dream of bar charts of failure, and others of alien examinations. Whatever the metaphor, our autistic dreams bypass the neurotypical script. They find exactly the right words to say what needs to be said.

Dreams might not have all the answers, but at least they give us permission to speak our own language.

We live in the age of advice. Everything is a lesson. Everything is a tool. Every moment has the potential to be optimized, branded, posted. The number of life coaches in the US has more than doubled in the last five years. Their messages arrive through algorithms, inboxes, wellness apps. Advice is ambient.

When things fell apart for me a few years ago, I was surrounded by advice. My phone sent reminders to drink water, journal, meditate. My coaches offered strategies for relationships, productivity, grief. Every click seemed to generate another recommendation. I kept collecting instructions, crowd sourced self-actualisation. But I didn’t know what I was supposed to be fixing.

Then I had a dream. I was trying to get a professional photo taken — a headshot, something that would help define me. But the photographer looked at me and said, “We’ve found the dead body. I’m sorry — it’s you.”

It wasn’t violent. There was no struggle. I had asked someone else to create my image, and it erased me. That was the cost. The dream didn’t offer advice. It offered an autopsy.

Dreams help us imagine what doesn’t yet exist

In many cultures, dreams are a way of making sense of the future. They offer not just insight, but structure — naming what matters, and suggesting how to respond. Rather than reflecting the world, they build it. This idea is still used today. Collective dreaming helps bring up shared worries and explore new options.

By gathering dreams across groups, some projects have begun to treat them as tools for orientation. Not symbols to decode, but drafts of futures worth practising. In difficult times, dreaming becomes a quiet rehearsal for what might follow.

“At times you have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.” — Alan Alda

Some offer direct instruction

In Iceland, it’s common for couples to dream the name of their unborn child. The name arrives fully formed. There’s no need to interpret. Among the Ese Eja in the Peruvian Amazon, people dream names. As children grow up, they look to their dreams to understand their role in adulthood. In some North American traditions, boys were expected to dream their adult identity and report it to elders.

In these communities, the dream isn’t symbolic. It’s instructional. It tells you what needs doing, or who you are expected to become. It circulates as knowledge, not metaphor.

This is what some anthropologists refer to as “cosmological vision.” A dream isn’t a story. It’s a plan.

It’s easy to miss how radical this is. Most modern dream theory assumes dreams are interior — subjective, disordered, poetic. But in these traditions, a dream can be actionable. It isn’t always private. It belongs to the group, because it affects the group. Your dream might dictate the shape of your actions rather than the content of your emotions.

Others shift us into action without explanation

Some of the most practical ideas in history arrived in dreams. Elias Howe’s breakthrough in sewing machine design came after he dreamt of spears with holes near the tip. Harriet Tubman spoke of dreams that showed her exactly when to move along the Underground Railroad. Larry Page dreamt the basic architecture for what became Google.

Even now, dreams continue to cut through indecision. A woman featured in a BBC article dreamt about a lump in her breast. She woke up and booked a scan. Her cancer was caught early. Another man dreamt about a long-lost friend. In the dream, he apologized. When he reached out, the friend was waiting.

These aren’t metaphors. They’re memos. Often, they arrive without decoration — just the task, just the image, just the action.

There’s something disorienting about these dreams. They don’t ask for decoding. They don’t care if you understand them. They only need to be followed. They remind us that clarity sometimes comes in fragments. Clarity comes in how we move, not how we rationalize.

Studies link dreaming to better decisions

Some researchers argue that dreaming serves no function beyond cleanup. But others see evidence of something more. A study by scientists at MIT showed that people who dream about a task perform better at it afterward. Harvard studies link REM sleep (the part of sleep when dreaming occurs) with problem-solving. Something happens in the dark that clarifies things.

Dreaming may help us simulate hard choices. The brain doesn’t just replay — it rehearses. Dreams don’t necessarily resolve the problem, but they change how ready we feel to respond. It’s not emotional closure. It’s cognitive preparation.

The dreaming brain anticipates. It knows things we haven’t acknowledged yet. The answer doesn’t always arrive consciously. Sometimes it shows up before we’re looking.

“Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.” — Malcolm Gladwell

Even if a dream never comes true, it can show you what matters. It can name what’s being avoided. It can show you what you’re already choosing — through pattern, through metaphor, through absence. A dream is a test of what’s stuck and what’s shifting.

A compass, not a mirror

Dreams are often described as a mirror. A place to see yourself, distorted. But some dreams don’t reflect. They point.

When we’re overwhelmed, we outsource. We look for maps. We google everything. We seek the wisdom of strangers, then wait for their certainty to feel like our own. But clarity doesn’t always come from consensus. It doesn’t always come from waking life.

Sometimes it comes without explanation. It arrives quietly, overnight. It bypasses trust. It hands you direction.

We don’t always need more information. Sometimes we need the part of us that already knows. That’s what dreams offer. Strategy isn’t always the answer. Sometimes we only need the momentum to move.

And sometimes, all that matters is that we listen.

Since my dad died two months ago, he’s become a frequent visitor in my dreams. He’s loitering outside Stockholm train station. He pops up behind me as I cross busy roads. He’s the face of an ancient Roman statue. Sometimes he’s back in his full dad-like humanness. Other times he’s more difficult to pin down. Mentioned in a conversation held with another dream character, or a half-sensed smell as I wake up.

Visitation dreams are very common.

These encounters are not unique to me. 58% of us have dreamed of a dead friend or relative. Some bereaved people interpret these dreams as symbols or echoes of their daytime thoughts. But many others are insistent that their friend — in the most real sense — communicated with them during the dream. Touch, as physical as when the person was alive, is often reported too. These dreams are called visitation dreams. They can continue for years, spiking on significant dates like birthdays.

These experiences are hard to make sense of.

Scientific theories of dreaming don’t really have a place for them. In recent years, we have learnt a lot about what happens to us when we sleep. Techniques like neuroimaging have helped demystify many aspects of dreaming. Evidence shows that dreams help your brain process emotions, memories, and learning. Their primary purpose is to organise and process what happened during the day.

Generally, we are content to turn to mainstream scientists for insights on our “normal” dreams. For dreams about being late for work, or exploring outer space, or running from tornadoes, these theories seem to make sense. When it comes to explaining night-time visits from dead loved ones, however, it’s a different story. Electrical impulses between neurons and hallucinations of the sleeping brain? For most of us, that’s just not a good enough explanation.

In fact, more than two-thirds of people see dreams about dead relatives as visitations. 71% see the dreams as a connection with the person they have lost. A huge 67% interpret their dreams as evidence for an afterlife. Even people without spiritual beliefs have contact with their dead friends through dreams. Around half of non-religious Americans surveyed last year had experienced dreams like these.

We face an awkward divide. On one side stand millions of people, certain they have communicated with the dead. On the other, established theories of dreaming, with no space for the possibility.

The study of dreaming is a funny business. It straddles neuroscience, art, spirituality, medicine, and countless other fields. Hundreds of domains claiming it as their own, but no clear home. Thousands of theories and experts, but even more unanswered questions. The problem seems to be that every dream, to its single dreamer, feels uniquely personal.

And no dream is more personal than those that bring dead loved ones, temporarily, back to us.

Visitation dreams bring comfort and closure.

Many people are comforted by these dreams. They say they bring acceptance and understanding. Their dreams evolve and change as they deal with their grief.

“One need not be a chamber to be haunted. One need not be a house. The brain has corridors surpassing material place.”

— Emily Dickinson

Sometimes the dead friend or relative comes to offer advice or connection. This input can be both practical and reassuring. Other times a visitation dream is an opportunity to say goodbye. These dreams give closure, forgiveness, and often peace. In suicide cases especially, they can be incredibly healing.

Beyond only comfort, visitations from loved ones prompt reflections on death generally. The dreamer often talks to their friend about their own mortality. Sometimes they ask philosophical questions about the afterlife. Strangest of all, in these conceptual conversations, the deceased is very likely to be communicating with the dreamer via telephone.

Dreams have always been closely connected to death.

While today the dead might use modern technology to reach into our dreams, the connection between these two worlds is nothing new. The line between death and dreaming has never been particularly airtight.

It is no coincidence that, in Greek mythology, Hypnos, the god of sleep, and Thanatos, the god of death, are twins. Australian Aborigines believe that their dead relatives send them messages through their dreams. James Hillman, a student of Carl Jung, thought an important element of dreaming was to experience death and be reminded of the value of life.

As we get closer to death, our dreams seem to shift and expand. Terminally ill people dream about death a lot. They see others dying, as well as themselves. Nurses who work in hospices report a similar phenomenon in their patients. More than half of people nearing the end of their lives, whether through illness or old age, will see dead relatives.

One group in particular is offering a new understanding of the dream-death link. Around 10–18% of people who come very close to dying, but then survive, will have a near-death experience. These experiences include things like seeing a bright light, intense emotions, and feeling that they have left their body. Some meet spiritual beings or dead relatives.

“The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.”

— Italo Calvino

Near-death experience survivors are coming forward in increasing numbers. And we are starting to see a pattern. After they recover from their ordeal, their dreams become intense and unusual. They are far more likely than other people to become interested in their own dreams. And more likely to find meaning in their dreams. They also have a heightened ability to lucid dream. They often use dreams to problem-solve in very creative ways.

It’s as if being close to death unlocks special parts of dreaming usually out of reach.

Dreams help us make sense of mortality.

When I was a child, my dad used to take me to a village fair in Derbyshire, to see floral displays. Today this area of the English Midlands is largely used for farming. But, in 600 BC, the Celts lived there. These early inhabitants celebrated spring by decorating village water wells with flowers. When the Christians arrived 1,200 years later, they attempted to stamp out the pagan custom.

The ruling Church had more or less succeeded. Until, miraculously in 1349 AD, one of the villages in the region escaped a terrible outbreak of the Black Death. A disease that had destroyed the neighbouring towns. Spurred by their gratitude for life, Tissington villagers defied the ban on well-dressing. They ignored the Christian clergy and embraced their old customs.

In the face of terrifying death, the normal rules of the experts in charge didn’t seem to matter. The rest of the county followed in their footsteps, and the practice continues even today.

The reports from dreamers about their encounters with death continue to stack up. And the explanations offered for these happenings remain inadequate, at best. Grief, for our own death and those of our friends, transforms us. It reshapes our perceptions, beliefs, and in some cases even our brains.

Perhaps these dreams, like the well-dressings of Derbyshire, are acts of defiance. Against the finality of death. Against logic cold enough to freeze out hope.

Reminders that in the face of mortality, life insists on meaning.

I hear around 500 dreams a week.

Sometimes from strangers, in the park, or online. Often friends, ex-boyfriends, colleagues. Each dream, like each dreamer, is perfectly unique.

But when I organise and sort them, I start to see patterns.

The realities of our daily lives seep into the stories. I sit down every Sunday to track the last seven days of dream-world. And I am usually unsurprised by what I find.

Scientists have known for decades that what we experience in the daytime colours our dreams in following night. Recent celebrity gossip. High-profile Twitter spats. Breaking election scandals. They all reappear in my data.

But amongst these quirky flashes in the pan, there’s one eerie consistency.

The end of the world.

Every week since the start of the year, the apocalypse has snaked through our dreams. It shows up more often than aliens or time travel. More frequently than most animals or politicians. We’re more likely to see Armageddon than see our partners cheat on us.

These dreams are not prophesies.

Some people think dreams can tell the future. This is a fierce debate. unlikely to be resolved any time soon. History does seem to be littered with strange future-predicting happenings.

So much so, that in the 1960s, both the British and American governments paid attention. They considered the dreams of their citizens to be a source of intelligence. And took steps to collect and leverage them. In the hope they might avert disasters.

In the Old Testament’s Book of Daniel, you can read about Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream. An old king saw a huge statue. It had a head of gold, chest and arms of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, and feet partly of iron and partly of clay.

His dream was said to foretell the downfall of successive empires. The first victim would be his current home, Babylon. This mini-apocalypse did, we now know, take place in 539 BCE.

However, since then, there have been thousands of reported apocalypse dreams. They came to nothing.

A collection of apocalyptic dreams of psychiatric patients was recorded by Mortimer Ostow. A psychanalyst working in New York City in the 1980s. In one dream, a man watched the world end. Grand Central Station was the epicentre of the disaster. A great ball of fire passed from that building onto Park Avenue.

Clearly, despite the fears of the patient, this dream was not a message from the future. The train station continues to stand, as solid as ever, in the middle of Manhattan.

When our dreams sync up, something is shifting.

It’s not unheard of for big groups of people to suddenly have similar dreams. Synchronised dreaming usually happens when something significant is changing in our culture.

Berliners shared dreams in the early 1930s, during Hitler’s rise to power. Americans reported similar nightmares around the time of the Twin Towers attack. When Covid forced us to socially distance, our dreams did the opposite.

A dream, considered in the singular, is something of an enigma. Its narrative is often nonsensical. The faces of characters a bit too blurry, or shifting between identities.

It stops and starts.

We’re in a hospital, then suddenly, somehow, also on a beach. After waking, meaning can sometimes be force-fit onto the dream. But not in any truly satisfying way.

The truth is that we were never supposed to interpret a single dream. We were never supposed to be lonely dreamers.

Because dreams don’t make sense in isolation.

There’s an Indian parable about an elephant, dating back to 500 BC. Three blind men come across the animal whilst out walking. Without sight, they use their hands to identify it.

The first touches the trunk, and believes it must be a snake. The second reaches for the elephant’s ear, and declares it to be a fan. The third blind man, who is standing at the back of the group, finds the tail. He insists it’s a spear.

Of course, all three are wrong. Their only hope of correctly naming the animal is to share what they have each learned. Hear what the others have to say. And combine their wisdom.

So it is with dreams. We each have a tiny piece of truth. Separate, alone, it is as ridiculous as calling an elephant a spear. But together, integrated with the truths of others, there is an opportunity for insight.

We know our current way of living is not working.

Most people are disappointed in the way the world is going.

In a survey of more than 18000 adults, less than half thought things would get better over the next 15 years. In lots of Western countries, including the UK and the US, this figure was less than 10%.

Swedish school pupils were interviewed about their fears. They were truly terrified of environmental disasters. They believed that the earth will be destroyed. Or degraded into something unrecognisable.

Half of British 11-years said they often worry about environmental collapse.

When I was a child in England, more than twenty years ago, we knew about environmental damage. It was heartbreaking to any little girl to hear about the starving polar bears. Or the orangutans lost in the flattened rainforest.

But it was softened by a sense of hope. The concept of control.

If I put my milk carton in the proper recycling container. And bought my bars of soap from the Body Shop. And signed a petition to save the turtles. Then it would be okay.

And if my childish efforts were not good enough, then the grown-ups would know what to do. And they would make sure it got done.

Now there is only what Adam Curtis calls “Oh-Dearism.” We hear about terrible things happening, and respond with resignation. The scale of the problem is so huge, and our energy so depleted, that we don’t even consider action.

All there is to say, is “Oh dear.”

Even Gen Z, who reportedly have the highest anxiety about this issue, seem frozen. Australia is especially vulnerable to climate disasters. But 65% of young Australians do no more than post their concerns online.

Our apocalypse dreams are urging us on to a better world.

For modern readers, the word “apocalypse” conjures up images of desolate landscapes. Burning buildings. Maybe zombie armies.

But really, this word has a more optimistic origin.

It comes from the Greek word “apocalupisis”- meaning “revelation.”

It is not senseless, tragic destruction. Rather, it is the removal of something old, to uncover something new.

Jerry Määttä is a researcher at Stockholm University. He looked at fictional stories about the apocalypse. He considered books, as well as movies, released over a period of more than 200 years. He found that this kind of entertainment was especially popular at certain times.

Audiences wanted them in the lead-up to conflicts and national emergencies. Määttä said they were a way for people to psychologically prepare. To get ready for the new reality that was coming.

Mortimer Ostow said apocalyptic dreams had the same purpose. As well as adjustment to social change, dreams could also aid adjustment to personal change.

Ostow saw that apocalyptic dreams were common at the beginning of psychiatric illnesses. When patients were dealing with feelings of powerlessness and rage. The dreams were the brain’s attempt to soothe itself.

The anger could live itself out in the fantasy of total destruction. And after the carnage, new life could be reborn.

A fresh start, one free of the frustration and suffering of the illness.

In dreams, the end of the world is just a new beginning, a canvas upon which we paint our hopes for tomorrow. - Patrick Rothfuss

Our dreams about the apocalypse reflect more than just our depression with the status quo. They are the recognition that old patterns must be discarded. Before new ways of living can emerge.

Perhaps they herald the transformation of societal and cultural norms. Or perhaps, even more terrifyingly, the transformation of ourselves.

We might not be ready to admit it just yet. But our subconscious will keep screaming until we do.

Our apocalyptic dreams are an invitation. A demand from the best part of ourselves.

To look, with maturity and ownership, at the truth of our lives. And to define a path forwards, through the flames.

Read more about my dream collection project at theweekindreams.com

I dreamed I was waiting in an old fashioned elevator, when the doors opened. A man rushed in. He was wide-eyed and terrified. Dangerous, reckless panic of a spooked horse. I reached out to embrace him. In my arms he softened, and then shrank to nothing. Until I was again, standing alone in the old fashioned elevator. But this time, my body pulsing with the gold that had passed between the two of us.

I knew in the morning sunlight that my dream was important. It had left a physical echo in my waking world body. I knew that it contained guidance and direction for the next steps in my life.

If only I could decipher its meaning.

I open the laptop and asked ChatGPT. I watched the screen type out it’s wisdom. Reading its generic platitudes, I regretted my virtual disclosure. It’s answer felt wrong. Sacrilegious.

For me, the dream held some indescribable fundamental truth. To the technology, it was simply a collection of words to be processed and translated.

It had cheapened my treasure.

Dream dictionaries, and their AI counterparts, don’t work

Of course, AI-based dream analysis tools are relatively new. Over the last couple of years specialized versions have sprung up online. Try DreamyBot or DreamInterpreter if you’re curious.

But they are basically high tech versions of the classic dream dictionary. Books that gained popularity in the 19th century by promising to reveal the meanings of symbols in your dreams.

The first dream dictionary was unearthed in Egypt, near the Valley of the Kings. It dates back to 1200 BC. You can see what remains of it on display at the British Museum.

For more than three millennia humanity has been looking to someone else to tell us what our dreams mean. And perhaps more importantly, what our dreams are guiding us to do.

True dream work has hundreds of benefits.

From community building, to creativity. Personal development to problem-solving.

These dream dictionary shortcuts provide none of this.

Psychotherapists developed a program that would offer interpretations of clients’ dreams. It was largely unsuccessful because it delivered a conclusive answer. Without giving the client space to explore.

The value has always been in the process, not the answer.

The work is the medicine.

Its easy to be seduced by slick, external, ideas

In 1845, near the Danish city of Copenhagen, Hans Christian Anderson wrote the story of The Red Shoes.

Karen, a peasant girl so poor she is bare-footed, is ambitious and creative. She collects rags of discarded fabric from the street. And slowly, scrap by scrap, stitches them together to form two red shoes. They are not beautiful, but she is proud of her creation. She knows, over time, her skills will improve. And with that learning, she can refine the shoes.

The events of Karen’s life take her out of poverty. She finds herself in the company of rich people. They tell her that her home-made shoes are embarrassing. They throw them away.

In place of what was lost, Karen buys elegant red high heels. Now she is wealthy, there is no need for her to sit sewing by candle-light. These new shoes demanded no investment of her time or skills. But on the surface at least, they are beautiful.

I thought of this story as I watched ChatGPI belch out its assessment of my dream. Its summary was clear and clean.

It had taken my jumble of half thoughts and tumbling sentences and transformed it.

Into something respectable and sensible.

Something devoid of my inconvenient human-ness.

Technology promises to tell us secrets about ourselves

Dream interpretation AI isn’t the only new technology promising to tell us who we are, and what we think.

Recent scientific advances in “mind-reading” have made headlines.

Neuroscientists say that by looking at brain activity, measured with fMRI, they can tell what that person is thinking about.

A lot has been written about the dangers of potential uses.

Intrusive governments shoving political activists in scanners. Demanding access to their deepest thoughts under the guise of national security.

Greedy CEOs gobbling up this new marketing resource. To better sell us things we don’t want or need.

For me, and I suspect many others, I only thought of myself. I’m not interested in peering inside other people’s heads.

It’s my own mind that I need to unravel.

I fantasize about seeing my whole internal life transformed into neat bar charts.

The messy complexities of my emotions into data tables. The burry-memories into objective records of events. The personality I can’t pin down, that drifts and shifts, into solid permeant fact.

When the scientists finished their review of my mind. And handed me the glossy brochure of numbers. I would finally exhale.

I could finally know, for sure, who I am.

More than that, I could know what to do.

“I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like, what to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to like, what to buy tickets for, what to joke about, what not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in, who to vote for, and who to love, and how to tell them. I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far I think I’ve been getting it wrong.” — Fleabag

You are the expert of your dream

I hear 500 dream reports each week. Each one is unique.

Every night our unconscious minds build us a perfectly exceptional story. A story that will be experienced by one person, one time.

As both the only author, and the only audience, the dreamer is the only legitimate expert of the dream.

The straight-lined, black-and-white allure of the dream dictionary is powerful. An opportunity for an outside clever person (or, clever robot) to force the dream chaos into compliance.

But it comes with a high cost. We trade our rightful position as expert of the dream, for the soothing comfort of certainty.

Our dreams become a little less magical.

Somehow further away from us.

As is so often the case in European folklore, Karen’s story doesn’t end well. Her beautiful high heels turned out to be evil. They caused mischief, and left her lost and alone.

A warning to us all.

To define our own path, and our own selves. However clumsy that might look. Before someone else rushes in to define it for us.

I’ve worn red patent shoes before. Even the priciest pair will rub away the skin on the back of your feet.

You can grin and bear it until midnight, then you’ll leave hobbling.

Disappointed to have missed the dancing.

Like the answers from dream dictionaries, they just don’t fit.

British folklore is filled with stories of fairies stealing children away from parents. Careless parents. The ones that forgot to hang horse shoes or spread salt around the cradle. The legends say that the babies were taken underground. Through hidden doors at the roots of Hawthorne trees.

These lost children would sometimes find their way back to the village, decades later. But, as time passes slowly in the fairy realm, they would hardly have aged at all. They returned immature and awkward.

That is how it feels for adults healing from childhood trauma.

Gratefully re-joining society. But poorly equipped to enjoy the complexities of normal love. Watching others succeed. Wondering when they learned how to do it. And why we weren’t invited to the lesson.

Childhood trauma makes adult relationships challenging.

Psychologists have known since the 1950’s about the devastating impact of poor parenting. The way a child bonds to their primary caregiver (usually a mother or father) has an important effect. Influencing their ability to form healthy relationships in adulthood.

Ideally, a child will securely attach. This means they feel protected by their caregivers. These children will grow up to be resilient and form satisfying friendships. They have gained important skills from their very first social connection.

But, for around 35% of us, something goes wrong.

The caregiver fails to respond to the child in a way that provides consistent safety. For some children, this will be abuse or neglect. For others, it will not reach this extreme. But is still distressing and disruptive to development.

Most of us learn in childhood to “cope” — which is to say, ignore, numb, manage, or reinterpret reality. We do it to survive, but our relational instincts get bent in the process — W. Allen Morris

Almost every county in the British Isles has its own version of the child-stealing fairy myth. In the Borders, the place where the North of England touches the South of Scotland, they tell my favourite one.

Thomas Learmont was taken by the Queen of the Fae whilst napping in the forest. Trapped as her prisoner for seven years. Upon his escape, his family and friends celebrated with relief. They knew that only the lucky ones came back.

But, the story was not over for Thomas. He was damned to return to the fairy-realm whenever the fairies summoned him.

And so it is for those of us with early trauma.

Decades after leaving our childhood homes, the echo of the original pain lingers. In the corner of our eye. Waiting for its chance to pounce.

Childhood trauma colours our adulthood dreams.

Childhood trauma snakes and weasels in through the cracks. Distorting our dreams. Throwing both the waking and the sleeping worlds slightly off track.

When we lie down in our adult-sized beds, our dreams slip back to that first heartbreak.

Adults who were lonely children have lonely dreams.

Survivors of childhood neglect have dreams filled with objects. And without other humans, especially friendly ones. The more extreme the neglect, the emptier the social life of the dream.

Even low-level neglect can impact dreams. Research shows that simply having an emotionally cold parent can be enough to make dream characters unkind.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you’ve been- Margaret Atwood

Adults who were anxious children have desperate dreams.

Children raised by caregivers who are inconsistent become anxious. Their parents were nurturing at times, but insensitive at others. Unlike the lonely children, who seem to give up hope of love, these anxious children crave it. In adulthood, they become to too dependent on their partners.

The dreams of these anxious adults are overcrowded with humans. When they’ve had a stressful day, the number of humans will increase even more. If they’re worried about a particular person in their waking life leaving them, this person will show up inside their dreams.

Their dreamscapes are the fulfilment of the scared child’s purest fantasy. To never be alone.

All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams- Elias Canetti

The desire for intimacy makes people believe strange things about their dreams.

Survivors of childhood trauma wander through a topsy-turvy existence. Where relationships with others can seem impossible, terrifying, or pointless. Sometimes all at the same time. It can be easy to fall for cheap short-cuts to connection.

Mutual dreaming is one such trap.

This is the idea that you can experience the same dream as another person. Occasionally even communicating through the vision.

Mutual dreaming is not supported by evidence.

Interest in this phenomenon peaked in the 1970s. Driven heavily by the strange experiments of Ullman and Krippner. Nestled in their Brooklyn research centre for more than a decade.

Ullman’s ideas quickly spread across the Atlantic. Enchanting some of the most intelligent minds of the age. Demonstrating that anyone could be seduced by the promise of this kind of connection.

Both Ullman and Krippner were born a century ago, and their ideas have fallen out of fashion. Modern science has disproved the theory of mutual dreaming. The evidence collected at the Brooklyn laboratory crumbled under objective review. But, their unfounded beliefs remain popular.

Google gives 14500 search results for mutual dreaming. Links to how-to guides. And message boards recounting anecdotes of success. The 2010 movie Inception may take some blame for the resurrection.

Mutual dreaming gives the illusions of connection.

Academics in the US looked at more than 100 mutual dream reports. Almost all shared between two people in close partnerships. They noticed that mutual dreams happened when the dreamers were having relationship difficulties.

The people in the study pretended, both to themselves and their partner, that a mutual dream had occurred. In the hope it would rebuild the intimacy they were missing.

In their desperation for connection, the pairs conspired to imagine it had been gifted through their dream.

They clung to the charade of impossible night-time interactions.

Compensation for the closeness they failed to grasp during waking hours.

Dreams can bring a truer kind of love.

The flashy, Hollywood-like, idea of mutual dreaming might be off the table. But that doesn’t mean dreams don’t offer a route to recovery and connection.

Much of this healing happens automatically. Arriving like a gift in the morning.

Dreaming, especially during REM sleep, gives our brains an opportunity to re-regulate emotion. It helps to process the difficult memories of our childhood. Not to delete them, but to make them less disruptive to our daily lives.

Other times we have to do a little work ourselves. Deliberately dig deeper into our dreams.

Jill Salberg describes how her dream opened a portal to healing her childhood trauma. It didn’t come through supernatural happenings, or sci-fi technologies. Instead, it was granted after careful and gentle probing of her past. And sharing, both her waking and her dreaming experiences, with friends and family.

She recognised her dream, of a witch bringing death, as a link to her early neglect. The vision gave her the language she needed to describe what had happened to her. And to find others who could understand and support.

Her dream wasn’t magic. But it broke the curse of isolation nevertheless.

All human being are also dream being. Dreaming ties all mankind together- Jack Kerouac

Traditionally, fairy tales don’t have happy endings. Before Disney transformed our myths with glitter and princesses, the legends we told were darker.

However, Thomas Learmont, the boy abducted by the Fae Queen, was said to have found peace. His childhood was full of pain. But his years underground had also granted him prophesy, creativity, and insight. He lived out his days travelling Scotland, celebrated for his achievements.

Thomas clambered up the roots of the Hawthorne tree and reclaimed his happiness. We can do the same.

Our darkest dreams remind us of what has been stolen. And urge us on, towards the daylight, to take it back.

I dreamed I was driving a car downhill. The breaks failed. I was speeding faster and faster towards a crowd of onlookers. Right on track for mass injury. A man pulled up in his car, alongside me. Through our open windows I could call out to him.

“Help! Warn them to move! Find a way to stop my car!”

Instead of acting on my frantic commands, he smiled pathetically. His cold sweaty fingers snaked onto my naked back. A parody of the comforting steady hand I needed.

Other people are haunted by ghosts and hunted by monsters.

My curse is The Disgusting Man.

I’ve met him in my dreams many times before. Sometimes he’s buried, helpless, under the sand. Clawing at my sympathy to protect him.

Other times he’s infuriatingly mishearing me as I urge him to throw water on a fire. His frailty and stupidity condemning us both.

I hate The Disgusting Man.

A more terrifying opponent would give the adrenaline buzz of a real fight. A cuter burden might ignite some maternal glow.

But he is the worst of all worlds. He doesn’t wake me from slumber in a dramatic panic. Instead, he leaves a heaving ache of vomit in the pit of my stomach that lasts all day.

I have written elsewhere about the gifts my dreams grant me. From social connection to career insight. But I struggle to even fake gratitude for The Disgusting Man.

Nightmares can feel like they come from an external source.

If I were living in 12th century England, I would blame The Disgusting Man on a mischievous Mare. A sleep demon sitting on my chest. Home remedies sprung up Across Europe. I would have armed myself against him. I could have kept him out with hay bales hidden under sheets and dirt smeared on gates.

Even today, if I tried hard enough, I could find a way to scape culpability for The Disgusting Man. Shifting responsibility onto some evil external entity. Perhaps labelling him an escapee from an alternative reality. Or a message from the Christian God.

There are 40145 dream-catchers on Etsy alone, promising to snare The Disgusting Man. Intercept him on his journey from his somewhere-far-away birthplace to my skull.

Nightmares are created by our own psyche.

As foreign as the monsters in our sleep might seem, the reality is that they come from part of us. Even though I resent the Disgusting Man and dread his visits, it was my mind that conjured him. It is my brain that writes him into his night time adventures.

I know I’ve foraged pieces from him from my past. His emancipated limbs from a TV news report. Those dead fish eyes from a creep on an empty train platform. A self-pitying simper from a troubled acquaintance.

But now, he is all mine.

All me.

You might not have met The Disgusting Man, but you probably have enemies of your own creation. Almost 29% of us have nightmares about ghosts, aliens, and paranormal entities. 20% of us see unknown dead people. 15% feel bugs crawling.

More than two thirds of us try to forget our nightmares as soon as the sun comes up. If we banish the intruder fast enough, we can pretend it was never there.

Nightmares show us the parts of ourselves we’ve supressed.

Psychoanalysts think that nightmares are the place where a forbidden part of ourselves come out to play. A part that our conscious waking mind works so hard, during the day, to supress.

Carl Jung called this forbidden part our shadow.

Jung said every person, no matter their life experiences, has a shadow. It’s where we hide the aspects of ourselves that we cannot bear to look at. These elements are sent to live in our shadow because they are shameful, or evil, or threatening.

Or simply incompatible with who we want to think we are.

As I grow familiar with my dreams, I grow familiar with my inner world- James Hillman

A psychotherapist describes how a nightmare illuminated the shadow of a patient. The woman had been suffering from chronic depression for four years. Ever since the death of her husband. She had religious beliefs that meant she could not look for a new partner. She told the therapist she was satisfied and had no desire for romance.

The patient seemingly, at least in her conscious mind, believed that story to be true.

Until one night, when she dreamed she was a horribly disfigured sexual predator. Her desire for romantic intimacy had been pushed down into her shadow. Mutating into something that now seemed terrifying and alien to her.

The more the shadow hides, the more it’s outside awareness, the tighter its hold over us. — Connie Zweig

Nightmares must be welcomed home.

Almost all societies tell a similar folk story. It’s a tale about a stranger arriving at a house. The stranger asks the house-owner for entry and charity in their hour of need.

There are cultural variations in the story, but a few things are always the same. In every version the stranger looks dirty and poor. But, really, he is a God or King in disguise. Ready to punish the inhospitable and reward the generous.

The same is true of our shadow, and the monsters it sends into our dreams to meet us. Growth for those who welcome it in. Difficulties for those who turn it away.

We find that by opening the door to the shadow realm a little, and letting out various elements a few at a time, relating to them, finding use for them, negotiating, we can reduce being surprised by shadow sneak attacks -Clarissa Pinkola Este

Supressing bad dreams doesn’t work, at least not for long.

German psychologists asked dreamers to block unwanted thoughts before bed. It made the number of nightmares increase. In fact, deliberately thinking about bad dreams makes them less scary. Researchers in Canada noticed that some nightmare sufferers mine dreams for meaning. They used it as a coping strategy.

For Jung, facing the shadow is not only about minimizing its power to disrupt our sleep and our lives. Facing the shadow is also an important part of growing into a well-rounded person. Without knowledge and acceptance of these hidden parts, a person cannot develop.

Alongside the darkness buried in the shadow are potential, gifts, and creativity. And most importantly, a full understanding of who we truly are.

How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole. – Carl Jung

Nightmares are not easy to accept.

I envy my English ancestors. I image them as peasant famers. Going about their simple 12th century lives. Nonchalantly brushing off their nightmares over morning porridge.

Cursing sleep demons for disturbing their pure and good minds with bad dreams. Hoping the goblin had moved onto the next village. Taking its horrible images and thoughts with it.

Facing the truth is a little less fun. That our nightmares, in all their darkness, are our own. A fundamental part of who we are. Something that must be seen, owned, and integrated.

I still don’t know what The Disgusting Man has to teach me. But perhaps I can start by opening the door.