Sleepless, dreamless nights

On the obvious but important relationship between dreams and sleep

I work in higher education, and my life is a little over-full as we approach the end of the academic year. Teaching alone would be one thing (a lot, enough), but the context of global crises we are living in, combined with institutional and personal challenges, means I am currently overstretched beyond measure.

I am usually a solid sleeper - early to bed, early to rise, and I usually remember my dreams in vivid detail, multiple vignettes and plots over the course of a night. But I have noticed amidst the busyness, overfullness, and stress of these past few weeks, I am not remembering my dreams like I usually do. I prioritize rest and have decent sleep habits, but all of that isn’t quite cutting it these days. I am barely remembering dreams at all, just a little snapshot here or there. Which is still something, but not my norm.

This has highlighted something that is incredibly obvious but perhaps worth noting: in order to dream, we need to sleep. And furthermore, the quality of our sleep impacts our dreams and our ability to remember them.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash. I read somewhere recently that koalas sleep 18 hours a day. I am dreaming of being this koala come mid-June.

I have written before about how we need to give ourselves time to dream, and that it’s not just about us as individuals - it’s also about us collectively, and how as a society and culture we need to value and prioritize sleep, dreams, and rest. I have also shared some tips on cultivating our relationships with dreams - and my goodness, getting good sleep has to be added to that list!

Part of what is going on with me right now I can identify as not getting enough sleep. There are a few nights where I have woken up in the middle of the night - such as the night last week when I temporarily lost my wallet - when my mind was too busy with worry to fall back asleep. For extra fun, my dog has also been waking me up like clockwork at 3:30 am, probably due to the patterns of animals moving outside in the night, but this has been making it hard for me to go back to sleep.

Another thing I’ve been noticing is that my mind has been so busy - with worries, with stress, with class planning - that the moment I wake up, it is off to the races. This makes it much harder for me to remember my dreams. When I wake up, my mind is already somewhere else, and it leaves the dreams quickly behind. I have a practice of daily morning meditation after I write down my dreams, which also means a daily practice of bringing awareness to the state of my mind. I am acutely aware of the busyness of my mind at the moment, am doing all the practices I know to try to ground and center, and yet…life is just a lot right now, and all I can do is be aware of this busyness and have compassion for it.

All of this to say: what my dreams (or lackthereof) are telling me right now is that I need more rest. There is unfortunately not a lot I can do about this right now - so much of it is related to external circumstances - but I hope that as the school year winds down, I can prioritize rest for my body and mind this summer. I did get some good rest this weekend, and plan to spend the rest of my Sunday doing as little as possible (as is possible as the solo parent of a very active almost-6-year old!).

This phase is also highlighting for me the relationship between my dreams and my meditation practice. My daily grounding, centering, and mindfulness practices support the steadiness of my mind, which have many effects, among them being the quality of my sleep and my ability to remember my dreams. My dreamwork and meditation practices inter-are (which is also part of why we always begin our dreamwork gatherings with a short centering practice!).

I hope you are getting rest. I hope you are getting good sleep. We need each other to rest. It is hard to overstate how essential this is, not just for dreaming, but for our overall wellbeing, individually and collectively!

With love and care, and wishing you sweet dreams,

Stephanie

Stephanie Knox Steiner, PhD is an enchantress, mother-scholar, dreamworker, community weaver, and peace educator who currently lives and teaches at the University for Peace in Costa Rica. She has been writing down her dreams since she was a teenager, and studied community dreamwork as part of her doctoral studies in the Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Ecopsychologies specialization at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She writes prolifically about enchantment, interbeing, and re-imagining education at her other Substack, Enchantable.