On Dreaming

On Dreaming

To the dreamers. The innovators. The designers. The people like Otto Loewi, 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 deep 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 night watching Rick and Morty, the season nine episode “A Ricker Runs through It.”² With the utmost respect to the show’s creators and writers, this is the scene as I remember it, a special moment in my life. Morty told Reese he loved 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 that was a Jay, one moment as I lived it: a laugh with all of me in it, leaning toward the two of us holding together.

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 its Trace finds its way back to them.

III

Dream with me for a moment.

My friend Elliott 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. These natural short sleepers 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.³

Which side of that am I standing on? Neither. The trait is far rarer than the wish for it, and the people who found these genes are careful to tell 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.⁴ I would imagine for someone who doesn’t have to go to work and take their family out for the day, 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: the two sides of one thing, resting on different schedules. 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.⁵ 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,⁶ simply, from the mind collapsing all available information it has onto a falsified account of reality.⁷

Or maybe other things, like major developments in math, science, and medicine.⁸

Or maybe major astronomical discoveries.

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.⁹

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 let mind and body keep their own schedules during the sleep cycle, it’s going to be hard to distinguish between the two.

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

Dream.

All day your senses take the world in. At night they go dark and the mind turns inward, running on what it gathered. 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. A moment that went wrong is still a lesson, if you let it be one.

It might be an anxiety about something coming up in your future. Hear it out, then let it go.

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). It’s angry that its ancestors were worshiped as gods, while it is forced to pee in a box in the laundry room.

My cat is one of my biggest muses. This fiction book is in the oven, and soon to come.

Pay attention to those dreams when you rest.

As Tolkien had it, we go on making by the same law that made us.¹⁰

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.

The last decent night’s sleep? Ask me tomorrow.

Never doubt yourself for being tired.

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

Dream a little dream, one step away from reality.¹¹

Notes

1. Hamlet reaches for sleep at exactly this threshold (to sleep, perchance to dream) and recoils at what may come once the body is set down. Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 3, scene 1.

2. Rick and Morty, season 9, episode 4, “A Ricker Runs through It,” aired June 14, 2026, on Adult Swim. The scene and the lines are given as I remember them.

3. Two literatures meet here, and the first needs stating carefully. In genetics, a small number of families carry mutations that shorten the sleep they need. Carriers of a DEC2 (BHLHE41) variant slept about six and a quarter hours a night against about eight for their relatives without it; carriers of a later-found ADRB1 variant, about five and three-quarters against nearly eight. He et al., “Transcriptional Repressor DEC2”; Shi et al., “Rare Mutation.” Both came out of the UCSF group of Ying-Hui Fu and Louis Ptáček, and further genes have followed. The trait is rare: Shi and colleagues put the ADRB1 variant at about four people in every hundred thousand. Familial natural short sleep is not the same thing as sleeping less on purpose. Held night after night to six hours or fewer, ordinary sleepers pile up deficits in attention and working memory, and rate themselves as less impaired than their performance shows. Van Dongen et al., “Cumulative Cost.” Nothing here should be read as saying that short sleep is generally safe or achievable. In the contemplative traditions, Tibetan dream yoga trains the practitioner to carry awareness through dreams and on into dreamless sleep, and Yoga Nidra holds awareness at the edge of sleep in deep relaxation: a cultivated practice rather than an inherited trait. On dream and sleep yoga, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep.

4. Johnson, On Seeing, imagines a life whose Jays have come into alignment: someone who hardly sleeps, whose inner balance seems to measure what each day will take, and whose rest comes in short, deep spells that mend the body while the mind stays lucid.

5. I use these as registers, not as a clinical chart. NREM names the body’s restoration, and slow-wave sleep, NREM’s deepest stage, does much of the consolidating of memory. Lucid names the mind’s, the layer where awareness persists into sleep. Lucid sleep is not a stage of its own; lucid dreams were confirmed in the laboratory during REM sleep, where most of them occur. La Berge et al., “Lucid Dreaming Verified.” One is the body’s half of the night, one the mind’s; they are two aspects of one sleeper, and 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. Diekelmann and Born, “Memory Function of Sleep.”

6. Coleridge said he composed “Kubla Khan” whole in a sleep that followed an anodyne (opium, by his manuscript note) and lost the rest of it to “a person on business from Porlock.” The account comes from his own 1816 preface, and many scholars doubt it, reading the interruption as a literary device or a later rationalization. Coleridge, Poems. Mary Shelley gave her own version fifteen years after the summer it describes: she began Frankenstein, she wrote, by “making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.” Shelley, Frankenstein, introduction to the 1831 edition.

7. Zhuangzi 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, Essential Writings, chapter 2. The Quantum Lens in its oldest robe: one moment, read as a man’s and as a butterfly’s, and neither reading allowed to swallow the other. The collapse in my sentence is only an image of a mind narrowing many accounts to one. That a waking observer’s mind collapses a held superposition is a minority reading of quantum theory. The Copenhagen school, Everett’s many worlds (where nothing collapses), Bohm’s pilot wave, the objective-collapse models, and the relational and QBist accounts each answer the measurement question differently, and the dispute is still open. Borrowed here as an image, not asserted as a physics.

8. Hardy reports, on the word of Ramanujan’s friends, that Ramanujan credited the goddess of Namakkal, Namagiri, with formulae that came to him in dreams; Hardy himself was sure his friend was no mystic. Hardy, Ramanujan. Kekulé said, at the 1890 celebration of the benzene theory’s twenty-fifth year, that the ring came to him in a reverie, atoms turning like a snake that seized its own tail; how much of that is memory and how much is ceremony is still argued. Rocke, Image and Reality. Otto Loewi recalled waking in the night with the design of the experiment that showed nerves signal chemically, writing it down, finding the note illegible by morning, and having the idea return the next night. Loewi, “Autobiographic Sketch.” Each comes down to us as a report, the discoverer’s own or a friend’s, and none of them shows how a dream does such work.

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

10. Tolkien, “Mythopoeia.” We sub-create, he argued, because we were ourselves made: the creative act is inheritance, not invention from nothing. The poem was written around 1931, and the whole of it first appeared in print in Tree and Leaf in 1988.

11. Keats ends the “Ode to a Nightingale” on the same uncertainty: “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?” Keats, Lamia, Isabella. The boundary I keep pointing at is the one his last lines refuse to settle. The refrain itself leans on an older song, “Dream a Little Dream of Me” (1931).

Bibliography

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