I have one note page on my cellular that I’ve been jotting sentence sketches and loose thoughts in for over a year now. Random insights or middle-of-the-night dream notes. The above are dreams that I tried to recall over the course of a week sometime earlier this year.
At the start of the pandemic, there were researchers all over the world tracking collective dream states and the vivid imagery associated with what they consider stress-related dreams. There were also people who mentioned having unusually vivid dreams of a futuristic world and outerspace after getting the vaccine. There’s a lot of science to explain this collective phenomena—that we’ve had more time at home during pandemic isolation to sleep and be in REM dream states while in isolation etc— but I can’t help but wonder if people have retained their ability to recall vivid dreams beyond the lockdown of year one.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had vivid and “unusual” dreams. There were mornings where I’d wake and tell my mother about dreams in far off places I travelled to just to have a good story to tell. We still practice sharing our dreams together in a half sleep haze, often surprising each other with the amount of detail and close-to-certain belief that it could have been a real place or event we were a part of.
While the wackiness of my dreams is nothing new, I have retained far more memory of dreams at this stage in life than I have ever before. I have recall of dreams that are so vivid I don’t need to write them down and can still tell the whole story if prompted. Other times, I’ll have a spree of nights where I can’t sleep between ~3-5am, and I’ll scribble a bit in my phone quickly to tire the mind. There is a curious part of me that wonders… if someone reads my dreamscapes, will they find any of them familiar? Might they have also experienced this strangely specific tour of a castle-turned-defunct-chocolate-factory? If these shared dreams were provoked by a shared traumatic reality, could random dreams also be shared to some degree?
Déjà vu, for me, is an uncanny experience where a real event can trigger the memory of a dream in which that very event occurred either exactly or pretty close to how I experience it in the waking world. There have been many times where the trippy acknowledgement of déjà vu out loud has been a shared feeling by others in a group.
This familiarity with the dream world, and all the provocations around which world is really the “asleep” one, has led me on a journey to become more of a conscious traveler and observer of dream worlds. The nights I know I am in dream state, I often feel like a detective hunting for clues to bring back to the waking world. Sometimes I feel it important to tell certain people my dreams out loud because they pick up on things I miss.
I don’t know though, so maybe I’m just bringing a string of words back. A blurry and slurred image tapped into a digital notepad. Maybe it’s just a creative exercise!
One of the most interesting parts I read in this piece for the Scientific American is that:
Researchers have documented countless cases of dreams assisting in creative achievement. Empirical studies also show that REM sleep aids in problem-solving that requires access to wide-ranging memory associations, which may explain why so many dreams in the 2020 surge involve creative or strange attempts to deal with a COVID problem. One survey respondent said, “I was looking for a kind of cream that would either prevent or cure Covid-19. I got my hands on the last bottle.”
I think it’s a phenomenal thing that science has given us hope that the dream space can be a place of radical innovation and problem-solving. Which may be why the impulse to keep sleeping / resting / pausing is high….even dreams can feel like work, especially when the waking world is just as goofy as our dreams.
Though they have been interpreted and seen as prophetic for thousands of years, I’m really stunned by the surge in dream recall for masses of people in the last few years. It’s so stunning, in fact, that Coors Light decided to use people’s dreams as the perfect place to drop their big superbowl ad last year (in case you missed it!)
With the help of Dr. Deirdre Barrett, a leading psychologist, author and expert on dreams, Coors created a film with specific audio and visual stimuli to induce the most refreshing dream you’ll have all year. Using Targeted Dream Incubation – the science of guiding dreams – Coors will shape and compel your subconscious using a stimulus film, and an eight-hour soundscape throughout the night, to trigger you to dream the Coors Big Game ad.
“I’ve studied dreams and methods to influence them throughout my career, but working with the artists of the Coors Dream Project was a novel opportunity to craft audio and visual stimuli that viewers could use to trigger specific dream content,” says Dr. Barrett. “We saw the results come to life in the Dream Lab trial run when participants reported similar dream experiences including refreshing streams, mountains, waterfalls and even Coors itself.”
“Targeted Dream Incubation is a never-before-seen form of advertising,” says Marcelo Pascoa, Vice President of Marketing at Molson Coors. link
Whether it’s a one-off stunt, or a potential “white space” for advertising innovation and discovery, it brings me back to a core inquiry I have around the notion of psychic sovereignty. Ads, media and messaging are an integral part of the infrastructure for how we navigate and mediate reality. With that, I believe it is not just our mental space but also our extra-sensory skills of perception and intuition that can be degraded by harmful media, and thus adversely effect our experience of reality. Media is magic, and often times it can get real dark.
I keep harping on the (oft unacknowledged) responsibility we have as media makers / cultural workers / academics here. Stunts like this where brands pull in “experts” to help them infiltrate our unconscious states is a little frightening, but we can think about what this means about how we consent to these forms of communication and what safe-guards are needed.
Is our waking consciousness just too full, too numb, too over-plowed by industrial grade content farms? If our sleep worlds are next up on the advertising altar, then I feel encouraged to keep this practice to map out dreams going no matter how weird it translates.
Because maybe, just maybe, we are experiencing very real places. Maybe the sand dunes I surfed last year exist on a far off planet. Maybe our dreams are one of the few places left we still have to learn in and explore in true freedom. Whatever it is, however they are interpreted, there is an infinite wildness to explore…and that’s where I am headed right now.
Sweet dreams if you got em, and restful slumber if you don’t <3