Reviving My Dreaming

Until the last year or two, I've experienced this in dreams and so much more. I've fallen asleep asking questions and woke with answers. Odd words or images have pointed me to new information. Dream series have helped me navigate life changes by offering broader perspectives on unsolvable situations. But dreaming could be just plain fun too. I'd snuggle into my pillow, fall asleep easily and await the night's surprises.

I lost touch with this crucial inner life though. I've even dreaded nighttime. It's taken hours shifting in bed to finally fade into sleep. Then, I might wake after only a few hours remembering nothing from that wispy world. Might as well get up for another day. Days in which I've felt flat, dull, mechanical and plodding — like I'm just existing day-to-day.

It took months for me to associate my daytime feeling with my absent dream life and even longer to realize how essential dreaming is. When I started trying to revive my dreaming, several of my night-shows just repeated daytime events. Not verbatim, but close enough to make me think, if I'm going to be as bored in my sleep as I am during the day, why bother?

But that's not how it's turning out.

To help jumpstart my dreaming, I read about dreaming. Using dreams for healing, insight, guidance, supernatural assistance or prophecy is deeply human. In most cultures and time periods, dreams matter. Whether they're believed to come from a deity, the soul or the unconscious, dreams feel meaningful. Often, they're thought to be messages.

To me, dreaming feels more like art than science. Yet I'm watching my re-awakening process and taking notes. And though science is a latecomer to the dreaming game, I'm delighted to find some of my dreaming experiences supported by theories and experiments.

It used to be difficult to do experiments with sleeping people, but not impossible. Now, with imaging technology such as EEGs and fMRIs, scientists can watch dreamers' brains in action. In fact, these machines helped prove that some people can know they're dreaming while dreaming — a state called lucidity. Some lucid dreamers can even communicate with researchers through pre-arranged eye movement signals or facial gestures. With these new methods, more scientists than ever are digging in to figure out how dreaming consciousness works, where dreams come from and what their purpose is.

Almost everybody dreams. And we dream nearly all night. Given that, we have plenty of opportunities to recall our nocturnal thoughts, emotions, sensory impressions and adventures. Yet according to sleep researchers Antonio Zadra and Robert Stickgold in "When Brains Dream," most people remember only 4-6 dreams per month. I assumed my dreams actually stopped but maybe I just hadn't been able to recall them.

So I decided to try. Pioneering dream researcher and Lucidity Institute founder Stephen LaBerge offers dream recall methods in his book "Lucid Dreaming," but says many people can simply tell themselves to remember their dreams as they're falling asleep and they will. It's like reminding yourself that you want to wake up early. Then you do, even before the alarm clock buzzes. That simple approach worked for me.

During the first three nights intentionally trying to remember my dreams, I was lucid — aware that I was dreaming while dreaming. Yet I couldn't recall what I'd dreamed just a second earlier. On the fourth night, I experienced a long, disjointed narrative just before waking for the day.

Now, waking slowly, drifting, allowing dreams to re-play in my mind during the minutes it takes the brain to switch from sleep to fully awake often aids recall. Using this "sleep inertia" period seems to cement dreams in my memory, at least long enough to write them down.

I'd been worried that my lack of dreaming might be a permanent loss, a part of aging. So I was thrilled at these signs of recovery.

Ordinarily, for me dreaming is free therapy. If I'm having problems, dreams kick in naturally to help. We're familiar with dream interpretation for self-discovery and resolving emotional problems, thanks to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. But neuroscientist Matthew Walker, author of "Why We Sleep," says healing happens while we dream. He calls dreaming a "soothing balm."

Here's how it works. During the sleep stage known as REM, the stage that produces vivid, bizarre, otherworldly dreams, the stress-producing chemical noradrenaline shuts off. At the same time, the brain's emotional and memory centers activate. In this calm environment, dreams re-play upsetting waking experiences in fanciful forms that remove the emotional sting and offer perspective. I think of it as the neurochemical basis for the common phrase, "it'll be better in the morning."

For healing to happen though, you have to dream about the specific event. Working with patients who were going through a difficult divorce, the late psychologist Rosalind Cartwright had them keep a dream journal. One year later, patients who dreamed about their divorce at the time it was happening were no longer depressed. The others, even though they dreamed generally, were emotionally stuck.

Artists and innovators have always known dreaming can spark new ideas and creative solutions. If you've ever experienced dreams you'd call bizarre because they just don't conform to waking life's rules, you've been in REM dreaming's creative cauldron. According to Zadra and Stickgold, the ingredients dreams have to work with are our memories — things we've learned, experiences we've had, feelings and sensations, relationships, the gamut of our life. But REM and non-REM sleep stages process this information in different ways. Consequently, they offer different solutions.

For example, people wakened from non-REM sleep and asked to solve anagrams tried logical, methodical strategies. They didn't do as well as those wakened from REM sleep, who answered instantly, effortlessly, seemingly intuitively.

Without my dream life, many months passed before I snapped to the connection between the emotional changes in my waking life and my dream absence. I'd tried developing new hobbies, learning a sport, joining groups. All non-REM strategies — rational, conventional. But they weren't working.

Suddenly, one morning I realized all of this activity was about trying to inspire myself. For that to happen though, I didn't need an external solution. I needed an inner one: unlocking my REM sleep. In REM dreaming, we make creative leaps, as if boundaries don't exist. Nothing is off-limits. REM dreaming pulls from everything we know — mixes, melds, grafts and pops out novel ideas in a flash.

Dream life and wake life, for me, is a continuous flow, each feeding and enlivening the other. Dreaming is my creative current, my vitality source. When it's active, I have more insights during the day. Synchronicities occur. I daydream possibilities. The world feels magical and alive. That's what I was missing.

Watching the process as my dreams return, I've noticed that what's happening in our bodies can show up in our dreams. More than once, when I needed to urinate while sleeping, images in my dream conveyed that message — a tiny adult-faced infant with a soppy diaper in one scene. Me running around unable to find a public restroom in another. That makes me wonder what else the body can tell the brain about through dreams. Could it alert us to health problems?

An article in Scientific American says dreams can predict Parkinson's and some other brain diseases. In her sleep lab at Sorbonne University in Paris, neurologist Isabelle Arnulf saw patients who were barely able to move during the day get physically active at night. Dreaming they were being attacked, these sleepers punched and kicked as if they were awake and fighting.

Normally, our muscles are paralyzed in REM sleep, keeping us from acting out our dreams. With REM Sleep Behavior Disorder (RBD), that doesn't happen. RBD, and milder muscle jerks hundreds of times during the night, may be an early sign of neurogenerative disease, usually Parkinson's. In an interview about how dreams reveal illness, Arnulf said more physicians are becoming interested in dreams because they can help with diagnosis and treatment. If we reported changes in our own dreaming to our doctors, maybe we'd bring even more attention and understanding to this vital part of who we are as humans and help researchers find cures.

Now that I'm dreaming again, I'm dreaming about dreaming. How can it be that we can hear without ears, see with our eyes closed, warm to the heat of an imaginary fire, and talk with characters who disappear with the light of day? Imagination is so powerful. How can we not be in awe of this magnificent dream world? It's even personalized just for us.

We have long traditions to draw on and science has learned a lot, but there's so much more to understand about this mysterious process. Dreams feel meaningful because they are. They're a universal part of the human experience. "Dreaming enriches our life while helping to guide us," said Zadra and Stickgold. Dreams show "us what we cannot yet fully explain." And the possibilities may be endless.

Christina Leimer is an independent writer and researcher. She can be reached through her website, ChristinaLeimer.com. Read More