Paying attention to dreams
I've not been writing, I've been dreaming
Hello community,
I’m writing a foreword to apologise for being slack these past couple of months. I have been focusing on various creative pursuits and spending time with family in Scotland and London. I am now back in Spain starting my life from scratch again after almost three months away. It has been hard to be consistent recently with self-initiated, on-going projects, but I have not stopped thinking about I Don’t Give a Spoon! I love writing this newsletter, the people who contact me and all the wonderful discussions it provokes. It is ever-evolving and changing as a concept and I’m grateful to those of you who stick with me through it.
- Rebecca
Paying attention to my dreams this year has been life-changing.
I noticed the intensity of the change in me this summer, and feel a different person to the rather nervous, flat individual I felt like only a few months ago.
Can dreams truly make such an overwhelming difference to one’s life in such a short space of time?
I realise that this claim might appear "spurious'' or "woo-woo", to borrow the term that those in the professional industries often use, but luckily, science journalist Alice Robb has written a book on dreams and their transformative power.
For the past few months dreams have been a lifeline, my daily micro-dosing, my antidepressants, my amphetamines. I first began to record my dreams in January, sporadically. I had started yet another diary, and like previous attempts, it hadn’t been a fruitful process. My diary entries tended to be downbeat, recounting anxieties and perceived failures. I therefore found it difficult, and not so cathartic, to read my diary entries at a later date.
Like other creatively-minded friends, I reach more helpful and positive conclusions for my mental health doing activities that challenge my limiting, preconceived notions of who I am. In the last newsletter I wrote, I spoke about how the guitar had helped me out of a particularly deep depressive funk. Writing creatively and making little films also helps. This is an example of one which helped me to process some things I was going through this summer:
So, the diary was a flop.
But then I began to sneak in small fragments of dreams here and there. My first dream log in this particular diary was on the 31st January 2022, where I wrote the following,
“Swimming through a huge ocean trying to find places to visit. The countries were reflected like dappled light around us. We were far into the sea and I mentioned the beauty of Italy. Large objects loomed beneath us. I wasn’t afraid.”
In the other part of the dream that night I was jeered at by my family for writing a feminist article. My dad’s partner gave me advice about writing, telling me to state clearly what it is I want to talk about from the beginning.
The first part of the dream was perhaps about my desire to travel, after coming out of the last Covid lockdown in Europe (Christmas 2021) but also a precursor to the more vivid dreams I’ve had over these past few months, which I will talk more about later. The second part of the dream is probably connected to an article I had been fretting about writing. It was sound advice my dream stepmother gave, and it’s advice that I remember to this day. I have a tendency to over-complicate things, yet my unconscious mind reminded me that sometimes it’s the simple statements or ideas that are better!
In Why We Dream, Alice Robb also speaks about the power of dreams to harness ideas and creativity. There have been countless artists, writers and musicians who have spoken about how dreams inspired their works of art. In 1902 a German physician called Otto Loewi laid the ground for the entire field of neuroscience when a dream prompted him to do an experiment that his waking brain had reasoned him out of doing.
It’s true that in the clutter of everyday life, peer pressure and expectation, we can doubt our instincts or shrug away ideas that seem insignificant or banal. Our unconscious lets us cut through the perceived idea that what we are thinking is useless, allowing us to entertain ideas that are more experimental.
According to wide and varied scientific studies Robb diligently records in her book, dreams aid us in many ways, helping us to memorise information, learn languages, even guiding us to access traumas and fears that we haven’t faced in waking life.
Conversely, nightmares can worsen the effects of trauma and depression—the dark side of dreaming. I remember a particularly awful period of my life where listening to podcasts about historical wars at night seemed more appealing than nodding off into the dangerous terrain of my unconscious.
Though as Robb says,
“a useful side effect of the therapeutic function of dreams is that, if we pay attention, we can see what our dreams are trying to process.”
If anything, though repetitive nightmares don’t heal our traumas, they alert the waking brain to the extent of the disturbance in our body. When we are going through a rough patch sleep is a welcome relief, but when that is disrupted, we know it’s time to take drastic measures and get help.
By February of this year my dreams took over.
I was writing pages of dreams with occasional personal life stuff sneaking in, but they were usually just addenda, rationalising the motifs appearing in my dreams. In her book, Robb advises readers on how best to record their dreams, relating her own journey, which started at jotting only a few vague lines down to later writing huge blocks of text on her laptop.
My dream journey hasn’t been so linear. I have always had vivid dreams and the ability to recall them fairly well, though this does depend on my mental state. In fact, it has been discovered that people suffering from depression are less likely to remember their dreams. Therefore my dream diary is always in flux. Short and patchy when I’m overstimulated and not sleeping much, but detailed and long when my life is stable.
For months my habit was to get up and make a cup of tea, take it back to bed and write down my dreams with a pen and notebook that I kept next to my bed. Robb warns that you must write your dream as soon as you get up, as your ability to recall your dream from waking up can diminish within 10 minutes. She even advises pre-writing the date before you go to sleep. I started following her advice briefly when I went to stay at my mum’s for a couple of weeks. Getting a cup of tea in the morning was accompanied with a barrage of (affectionate) mum questions which somewhat diminished my dream recall.
I've found however, that writing immediately after waking doesn’t work for me. When I have the allure of tea in bed, I am quicker to jump up and get going. My dream recall is pretty good. When I think, oh I’ve got to sit up and start writing, I delay waking up, and when I do, feel grumpy and groggy, distracted by my missing tea. So I am back to making tea and writing. So do what makes sense for you, especially if you are a parent, or living with parents!
Robb is a strong advocate for lucid dreaming, which is a state of dreaming that allows you to recognise that you are dreaming, thereby giving you the ability to control your dream as you sleep. There are tried and tested methods for lucid dreaming. I believe I’ve had around two lucid dreams in my life, though they happened by chance.
At this stage in my life, lucid dreaming doesn’t appeal to me so much, as one of the things I suffer from in waking life is the need to control. Dreamland is a perfect place to practice accepting what I cannot change. I am prepared to let my subconscious mind take me for a ride, be it unpleasant or not. I relish the joy of being able to tap into rich and wondrous alternative universes. I relinquish control, and it gives me hope that things will turn out okay when I do. Even when dreams are terrifying, sad and bizarre, I accept that all these states are part of the living experience.
That being said, Robb cites studies that have shown that lucid dreaming has been effective in stopping recurring nightmares. Her book also provides accounts of lucid dreamers that claim that they have been able to take control of their life, curtailing persistent anxiety through lucid dreaming.
And contrary to my personal feelings about lucid dreaming, Robb argues that lucid dreams don’t take away the mystery of your unconscious mind, it’s more that they give you a route to tap into it. Who knows, I may give it a try one day. Perhaps, in some years time, ongoing research into lucid dreaming will reveal huge, as-yet-unknown beneficial aspects.
Before I began charting my dreams, I was mentally trapped.
My self-limiting beliefs stopped me from doing almost everything I really wanted to do, bar treading the safest, most familiar boards. Chronic illness and Covid fear had created a huge barrier of intimacy between me and the people in my life. The prospect of getting out into the world and doing things with people I knew, let alone people I didn’t know, was terrifying. I am sure I wasn’t alone in these fears. Yet despite all odds, I have managed to turn this end-of-the-world fear-thinking around in a matter of months.
The intensive Spanish course I physically attended in spring was the catalyst. I went from a working-from-home, “lockdown mentality” to doing a four-hour round trip for a two-hour class each day. Not only that, but I confronted my worst fear whilst attending the course. I caught Covid just as I was about to take the exam. As a person vulnerable to serious secondary effects, I was terrified of what might happen. I had visions of living with chronic fatigue again, and all my hard work studying for the exam going to waste. None of these things happened. It’s true that they could have, but they didn’t.
I realised that although it was true that my fears were based on real things that had happened to me, there was also a lack of evidence that they would happen again in the way that they had before. I also realised that even if the “bad things” happened again, I could preempt how to deal with them better the next time around, based on knowledge gained from past experience. I could trust myself to be able to deal with things when they came up.
This mindset was also encouraged by reading my first ever self help book (I’m stubborn!), Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.
And this is where I introduce the big sexy sign that walked into my life. That is, the moment I was able to observe, merge and resolve my neuroses and fears.
Dreaming of Apocalypse
It was a recurring dream. I had it for the first time in April, whilst trying to get my mind wrapped around advanced Spanish grammar, and the usual negative self-talk about not being good enough. This is the dream, transcribed exactly as it was in my diary:
“I was texting Elena about the sky because it suddenly broke into a thousand lights of pink and yellow. I was texting E anyway and as I did the sky burst (celestial light, cylinders of unmentionable colour). Everyone turned to look in wonder at the horizon. It was ahead of a ship. But a split-second later we saw the water underneath fold and the ship explode open. Us, who were on the street, with our mouths open, knew at that moment that it was the end. I wanted to shout, “I love you” to my family but there was no time. We were plunged into darkness. I heard explosions and felt all kinds of movements. I wondered if I’d survive and if it would hurt. I knew I wouldn’t. It felt like a journey. I woke up.”
It’s not particularly well-written but it was scribbled down in the middle of the night. I don’t often wake myself up to write down dreams because 1) I’m lazy and 2) I have trouble sleeping. But it felt important. I remember waking up feeling disturbed but transformed. We talk about anxiety as “end of the world thinking” and that is exactly what my anxiety feels like. The what if - what if - what if – until the only conclusion you can draw is, more or less, the end of the world. And my dream LITERALLY showed me that – the end of the world. It let me experience what it might feel like, and not only did I survive it by waking up, but it was breathtaking to behold. The most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
The dream stuck in my memory but I didn’t think about it too deeply until I had another “apocalypse-style” dream this summer. I was staying in Scotland with my dad and his partner, working in a local deli and recovering from a nasty bout of depression and sleep troubles. My new preoccupation was my family. I had spent so much time apart from them that seeing them again was overwhelming. I was so aware of their fragility, the fact that we were all getting older, and I worried about the fact that I wasn’t yet in a position to help them.
It was at that point that the dream returned. It was different this time. We were pre-warned about the end of the world coming, and the sea rumblings and explosions began to threaten (it always comes from the sea), yet everything stopped before any real damage was done. We were going to survive. I remember dream-me even feeling a little disappointed. As in the first apocalypse dream, and the dream I referred to at the beginning, where I stopped feeling scared of the looming shapes beneath me, my fear of disaster was dissipating.
And sure enough, that began to happen in life. Disaster striking became less of a daily probability. My dreams were, in some odd way, giving me a kind reminder that I could manage my anxieties. Since then, I’ve had a few more apocalyptic dreams. Over the summer my dreams were generally visually stimulating and exciting. These were most welcome, as my daily life had got rather repetitive and dull. I had made the decision I was going to dedicate a lot of time to writing, and to do that properly, I needed life to be uneventful. I was going to bed at 10pm every night, playing guitar and exercising frequently.
Therefore, weirdly enough, my dreams served as a kind of nighttime stimulant, in order for me to not die of boredom. My subconscious had my back, and for the first time ever, I looked forward to going to bed and having early nights. At the time, I felt ashamed that the most exciting aspects of my life played out in my dreams, but I’ve come back to look on that era fondly.
Now back to my “normal life”, I am fast shedding the anxieties that held me back before. I am volunteering in my local community, I am going out and talking to other artists, starting up projects. After years of abject fear (and a false start during Covid) I am starting up a political choir again. I am teaching SPANISH to an immigrant group and learning how to drive (in Spanish!!).
I realise I am overly-impressed with my ability to speak another language fluently, a feat that millions of immigrants achieve all over the world daily, but honestly I would have thought it impossible to do what I’m doing now a year ago. My progress to fluency was slow (it’s taken me four years to get to this point), but it was also understandable, considering personal and world events. I was so ashamed that I hadn’t become fluent after a year or even two years of living in Spain that I avoided situations that would have been useful for my personal growth (and my Spanish, lol). All I really ever needed was to have faith and trust that with hard work and time, it would improve. And it did!
Realistically, it wasn’t the dreams themselves that prompted me to make changes in my way of thinking. Yet they served to remind me that the steps I was taking in waking life were working. Sometimes, in the chaos of life, we forget to notice and keep track of our progress. They were a visual reminder that I have and will continue to be able to manage difficult transitions in life.
The fact that they were visually stunning and apocalyptic appealed to my own sense of theatrics and dark humour. When I described them to other people they’ve looked at me in horror or misunderstood what was so transformational about them. They tend to think that what inspires me about them is the “carpe diem”, fuck it, do it because the world might end tomorrow, cliche.
But that’s not it. Yes, I now have a renewed sense of urgency in wanting to achieve the goals that are important to me. But this doesn’t come from a fear of time running out, and more from an appreciation of what the world really is. As much as there is ugliness, it exists alongside beauty. As much as I can feel lonely, sad and unloved at times, my dreams remind me that there are people I love. My desperation to tell them I loved them when my dream-self thought the world was ending lingered with me.
Why are we not desperate to show the people we love that we do in waking life? It is difficult, especially when we can’t control the way others behave. And how can we see the beauty in everything when we notice others are so keen to destroy it? The end of the world will be accelerated by humans and their lack of care after all.
I don’t have the answer to these questions, but the least I can do is share with others what I see in my dreams.
Postscript
This is the part where I usually share all the other things I’ve been up to. But I feel like today’s newsletter is sufficient food for thought.
As I’ve mentioned,I’ve begun working more in my local community. Community work and activism have always been very important to me, and I felt very unmotivated when I was unable to participate. I am currently unemployed whilst I find work that better suits my creative and activist pursuits. Therefore if you like what I do, and can afford to buy me a coffee or two, I would be most grateful.
I will think about something nice I can do for regular supporters, although it might take a while to get that started. I’m sure my dreams will give me a nudge when they know I’m ready.
Sweet dreaming!
Here’s the link to donate to my Kofi account:
To me, dreams are how I navigate the world. If I don't remember them, I'm upset. I've had books and poems come to me in dreams. This is a great blog, I'm going to have to read it fully and watch all those videos. Fascinating, thank you.