What do you do with your dreams?

And what are dreams for, anyways?

Some of my notes on the PBS special What Are Dreams?, drawn in 2009

“I like to sleep so I can tune in and see what’s happening in that big show. People say we sleep a third of our lives away, why I’d rather dream than sit around bleakly with bores in ‘real’ life. My dreams…are fantastically real movies of what’s actually going on anyway. Other dream-record keepers include all the poets I know.”
– Jack Kerouac

Hey y’all,

I have a very simple question for you: What do you do with your dreams? Do you remember your dreams? Do you write them down? Do they make it into your work? What do you think dreams are for? Tell me in the comments:

I started writing down my dreams as a teenager, after I got my hands on Jack Kerouac’s Book of Dreams. He collected his dreams by scribbling in his notebook the minute he woke from sleep. Over the years, I’ve been on and off again with dream logging — lately, I’ve been writing them down in my diary again after I finished another James Hollis book.

Hollis is a Jungian, so he believes dreams are a gift from the deepest parts of our soul. Here’s what he writes in Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life:

We do not summon dreams up. If you think so, try to order up a certain category of dream and see if the psyche pays any attention to you. But on an average of six times per night, we are visited by this other world, which is nonetheless our world. Such tremendous expenditure of energy is neither random nor lacking in purpose. Nature does not waste energy. Attending this meeting point of inner and outer worlds is the chief office of depth psychology, the mystical tradition of the world religions, and the daily task of each of us. From this meeting point, creative energies arise, revelation appears, and each of us is initiated into a larger, developmental spirituality.

Hollis is the first person I’ve ever read who is against the practice of lucid dreaming, because it defeats the whole purpose of dreaming, which he believes is to ask of these images that are served to us:

“Why has the psyche spoken to me in this way? What does it wish to tell me? What do I need to learn here? Perhaps where do I need to be humbled in order to do that?” So the whole notion of lucid dreaming is contrary to soliciting the wisdom of our nature. It’s seeking to control it one more time, one more subtle way.”

If you poke around online, there are tons of people in the tech sphere who see lucid dreaming as one more way to squeeze more work hours out of the day. There’s even a whole startup dedicated to helping people work in their sleep.

I often think of making collages as a kind of day-dreaming with the hands

On the one hand, I’m completely repulsed by the idea that we would pervert the gift of sleep and our dreamtime by exploiting it for yet more “productivity.” On the other, I know there’s a long history of artists trying to harness their dreams for their creative work. (The musician Aphex Twin claims a great deal of the second volume of his Selected Ambient Works was inspired by lucid dreaming.)

In Art & Physics, the writer and surgeon Leonard Shlain wrote about his interesting method of “self-education”:

Serendipitously, I discovered a way to heighten my creativity. My habit was to read a popular physics book late at night until the snooze gremlin nudged me with the signal that it was time to call it a day. Prior to falling asleep the following night, my mind relatively empty, I leafed through art books. The next morning, I would often connect images I had seen the night before with concepts in physics contained in my previous night’s reading. Something mysterious happens in the creative process during dreamtime, and I am an avid proponent of the school that advocates, “sleeping on it.”

I, too, believe deeply in the power of “sleeping on it.” And it needn’t be for high-falutin’ art work: Just a few months ago my wife Meghan was trying to wire up a switch for a bathroom fan and couldn’t get it to work — she dreamed up a solution in her sleep!

A collage based on something I heard a fourth grader say