On Dreaming

On Dreaming

To the dreamers. The innovators. The designers. The people like Kekulé, Ramanujan, and Mary Shelley. The people that kept the world moving forward.

I

When's the last time you got a decent night's sleep?

Good question, right? If you laughed when I asked, I brought you joy — mission accomplished. The things I'm about to say might keep you up at night, so it's best to skip this one if you toss and turn over the thought of existence.[1]

For me? These days, I'm lucky to get four hours at most. Don't ask me why, or how — I'll tell you anyway: because I didn't move around a lot that day.

Catch me on a day where I walked around at any local attraction with my family, and you'll catch me in full REM sleep, body and mind, for hours. I'll also wake up hungry.

But that's just me. I'm neither here nor there, and to you, I'm a nobody, so what does it matter?

What does it matter, actually.

II

This reminds me of a joke from a recent episode of the new season of Rick and Morty. With the utmost respect to the show's creators and writers, this is my accurate depiction of a special moment in my life that occurred while I was watching the show. Morty tells Reese he loves him — but Reese wasn't at the controls of his own body. He was under the control of a "Time Cop," which is, under my framework of perception, oddly enough… exactly how I'd perceive an alien, angel, or superior being would act and react in our three-dimensional environment.

The Time Cop answered by admiring how much matter Morty was made of, and I laughed loud enough to startle my wife, who didn't see the joke the same way I did.

But I turned to her and said "I love how much you matter," we both laughed, and the Jay traveled its course for the evening.

I hope someday the incredibly witty writers read my writing, and see how much that moment meant to me — silly as it sounds, me being nothing. I still hope the Jay returns to them.

III

Dream with me for a moment.

My friend Elliot tells me about a group of "balanced individuals." I can't remember where he said they were, but these individuals had achieved a state of balance so pure, they could operate on an hour of sleep. Later in life, I found the correlations waiting on both sides of the aisle I tend to walk. On one side, the science: a very small number of people carry mutations that genuinely shorten the sleep they need — natural short sleepers, who wake restored on less than the rest of us and appear to lose nothing for it. On the other side, the contemplatives: traditions that train the practitioner to keep the mind awake while the body sleeps, a deliberate and cultivated separation of the two.[2]

I should be plain about which side of that I am standing on, because the honest answer is neither. The trait is far rarer than the wish for it, and the people who found these genes are careful to separate an inherited short sleep from a chosen one. A chosen one costs exactly what everyone has always said it costs. My four hours are not a gift. They are what is left over.

What must this feel like?

In On Seeing, I talked about an individual who knows exactly how much food they need to move through the day. I would imagine for someone who doesn't have to go to work, and take their family to local attractions, they probably wouldn't need much food or sleep.

Life would just flow.

What would sleep be like for them? I imagine it would be a separation of mind and body, as stated before. NREM for the body, to recharge the energy not gained through food; lucid sleep for the mind, to recharge the balance by planning the next day in advance.[3] If the body needs longer, more gets planned. Weeks, months. Not to the detail — but I can only imagine the intent of creation becomes clear to an individual in this state of mind.

So the creativity flows, simply from the mind collapsing all available information it has onto a falsified account of reality.[4]

Or maybe other things, like major developments in math, science, and medicine.

Or maybe major astronomical discoveries.[5]

Or maybe major internal discoveries.

Not biological, but metaphysical.

The discovery of the unified one, the removal of ego, and the dream of humanity as a whole coming together.[6]

Wake me up — I almost forgot we were dreaming.

IV

That sounds pretty good, doesn't it?

I think so, and to be honest, there's nothing wrong with dreaming.

But there's a lot to be said about sleep in general.

When you're tired, rest. Don't justify it to the people around you if you can avoid it (don't fall asleep at work, for instance — but some shadow work needs to be done in your off time to resolve that concern).

Rest because you need to rest. Until a human is able to efficiently separate mind and body during their sleep cycle, it's going to be hard to distinguish between the two.

But the signal is clear: you're tired, recharge.

Dream.

Dream a little dream, that is one step away from reality, a constant collapse of realities inside your head.

Take note.

This is your brain telling you what you need to do in a language it doesn't understand.

It might be a past trauma you need to release.

It might be an anxiety about something coming up in your future — also something worthy of dismissal.

But pay attention to the funny dreams.

The ones where your cat is a Nihilist with an internal dialogue about scratching at the bounds of its own existence (your back door) — angry that its ancestors were worshipped by the gods, while it is forced to pee in a box in the laundry room.

I told you once my cat was one of my biggest muses. This fiction book is in the oven, and soon to come.

Pay attention to those dreams when you rest.

In the words of Tolkien, again: we create because we were created.[7]

Let your brain do its magic.

V

For me, tonight, I've a lot to do the next few days. This might inhibit my ability to write — we'll see.

Tonight, I need rest.

Both kinds.

Never doubt yourself when you're tired.

It's only your brain and body getting you ready for what's next.

Dream a little dream — one step away from reality.[8]

Notes

1. Hamlet reaches for sleep at exactly this threshold — to sleep, perchance to dream (III.i) — and recoils at what may come once the body is set down. The fear of rest and the fear of existence have always been the same fear wearing two coats.

2. Two literatures meet here, and the first needs stating carefully. In genetics, a small number of families carry mutations that shorten required sleep: DEC2 (BHLHE41), whose carriers average roughly six hours a night against eight for their non-carrier relatives (He et al., 2009), and later ADRB1, whose carriers report four to six (Shi et al., 2019), both mapped in the work of Ying-Hui Fu and Louis Ptáček at UCSF; further genes have followed. Accuracy note: the trait is rare — the ADRB1 variant has been estimated at roughly four people in every hundred thousand — and the literature is explicit that familial natural short sleep is not the same thing as sleeping less on purpose, which does impair cognition and mood. Nothing here should be read as saying that short sleep is generally safe or achievable. In the contemplative traditions, Yoga Nidra and Tibetan dream yoga train the practitioner to hold the mind awake while the body sleeps: a cultivated separation rather than an inherited one.

3. Register note: I use these as registers, not as a clinical chart. NREM names the body's restoration — the slow, dreamless depth, where slow-wave sleep does much of the consolidating. Lucid names the mind's — the layer where awareness persists into sleep. One is physical, one is metaphysical; the night runs both. The clean split is mine and not the literature's: REM does its own consolidating, and the two states share more work than the pairing suggests.

4. Chuang Tzu woke from dreaming he was a butterfly and could not say whether he was a man who had dreamt the butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming the man (Zhuangzi, ch. 2). The Quantum Lens in its oldest robe. Register note: the reading that a waking observer collapses a held superposition is one contested position among several — Copenhagen, Everettian many-worlds (on which nothing collapses), Bohmian mechanics, objective-collapse theories such as GRW, and the relational and QBist readings all differ on it fundamentally, and physics has not settled the question. Borrowed here as an image, not asserted as a physics.

5. Coleridge claimed to have composed Kubla Khan whole in an opium sleep and to have lost the remainder to a knock at the door — the person from Porlock. Accuracy note: the account comes from Coleridge's own 1816 preface and is now widely doubted by scholars, who read the interruption as plausibly a literary device or a later rationalization. The sleeping mind handing up finished work is a claim the poet made about himself; it is not established fact.

6. Jung called this the work of individuation — the long movement toward the Self, in which the ego is decentered rather than destroyed. It is the same vocabulary I reach for when I name the shadow work; the dream is where the unconscious does its first drafting.

7. Tolkien's line is from Mythopoeia: we make still by the law in which we're made. We sub-create, he argued, because we are ourselves sub-created — the creative act is inheritance, not invention from nothing. The poem was published in the expanded edition of Tree and Leaf (1988).

8. Keats ends the Ode to a Nightingale on the same uncertainty — Was it a vision, or a waking dream? The boundary I keep pointing at is the one his last lines refuse to settle.

References

He, Y., Jones, C. R., Fujiki, N., Xu, Y., Guo, B., Holder, J. L., Rossner, M. J., Nishino, S., & Fu, Y.-H. (2009). The transcriptional repressor DEC2 regulates sleep length in mammals. Science, 325(5942), 866–870.

Jung, C. G. (1968). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.; Collected Works Vol. 9, Pt. 1). Princeton University Press.

Keats, J. (1820). Ode to a nightingale. In Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and other poems. Taylor & Hessey.

Miller, C. B., & Espie, C. A. (2019). Short sleep: The genetics of a rare phenotype. Neuron, 103(6), 953–955.

Shakespeare, W. (2006). Hamlet (A. Thompson & N. Taylor, Eds.). Arden Shakespeare. (Original work published c. 1601)

Shi, G., Xing, L., Wu, D., Bhattacharyya, B. J., Jones, C. R., McMahon, T., Chong, S. Y. C., Chen, J. A., Coppola, G., Geschwind, D., Krystal, A., Ptáček, L. J., & Fu, Y.-H. (2019). A rare mutation of β1-adrenergic receptor affects sleep/wake behaviors. Neuron, 103(6), 1044–1055.

Tolkien, J. R. R. (1988). Mythopoeia. In Tree and leaf (expanded ed.). Unwin Hyman.

Wordsworth, J. (Ed.). (1997). Coleridge: Poems. Everyman. (On the composition and 1816 preface of Kubla Khan)

Zhuangzi. (2009). Zhuangzi: The essential writings (B. Ziporyn, Trans.). Hackett.

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