The healing humor of dreams

On the therapeutic potential of our dreams' hilarity

Dear dreamers,

I’ve just returned from the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor conference, which has had me thinking about the healing humor of our dreams.

A few weeks ago, I had a dream image of a dog running down the street in a giant dog costume. From my dream notes:

I was on my way to a cafe and I saw a dog running down the street in a giant dog costume that trailing behind it and it was hilarious and made me laugh. It was so big that it seemed like there must be a second dog or human in the back legs.

The image is hard to fully capture in words and was funny both within the dream and when I woke up. The hilarity of the dream stayed with me and left an imprint on me for days afterward. I laughed every time I thought about it.

It was like this but MUCH bigger, with the costume extending the length of the full city block it was running down

A fun part of community dreamwork is that sometimes you don’t even realize how funny a dream is until you say it out loud. I can’t tell you how many times at our monthly dream circle I’ve laughed to the point of tears while telling a dream, or had to catch my breath while telling it from laughing so hard. Some of my best moments of laughter happen during community dreamwork.

Dreams can be hilarious, and humor and laughter can be healing. Part of the mission of the AATH is to share the healing, therapeutic, transformative benefits of humor. As the website explains, “humor provides innumerable benefits to our overall health and well-being, including reduced stress, greater resilience, decreased depressive symptoms, and even increased pain tolerance.”

When I think of the most healing moments I’ve had at our dream circle, some of them have been laughing about a dream together. Dreams can provide such hilarious, nonsensical, and ridiculous imagery, and belly laughs carry immense healing power.

In the heaviness of this collective moment that is filled with so much pain, violence, and destruction, we need all the healing we can get, and laughing at our dreams is one such pathway, a momentary reprieve. The Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futurs collective also identifies humor, the ability to laugh at ourselves and not take ourselves too seriously, as key capacities and dispositions for hospicing modernity and building worlds otherwise. We have to keep laughing to find our way towards different worlds that are more laden with joy, more life-affirming.

May your dreams give you something to laugh about, and may your dreams and laughter be healing.

Stephanie