Anita Rao
For a long time, when people told me that an idea for something came to them in a dream, I was highly skeptical — thinking: Creativity takes work. Things don't just come to you. That hearty eyebrow raise remained until very recently, when the name for this show came to me in a dream. I was staying in a hotel on a work trip enjoying a night of sleep in a king sized bed — and bam. I woke up at three in the morning with just one word on my brain: Embodied. I don't know how it happened, and to my knowledge I haven't gotten creative guidance like that ever since. But it left me with so many questions: How meaningful is the content my brain is turning over while I'm sleeping? And if I started paying more attention to my dreams, what could I find out? This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. Welcome to the strange world of dreams.
Catherine
I often put my phone down somewhere and can't find it later — like the counter, couch, table, shelf, floor. And shortly after I started dating my now husband, I dreamt that I did this with a baby. I lost and forgot my baby in a drawer or in a duffel bag. I'd forget to feed it for days, but I always found it. It was always fine, but I woke up with an intense feeling of stress.
Grace
I remember back in high school in my psychology class, we had to keep a dream log for about a month, and I had one for every single night. And I remember some of my classmates didn't have a single dream at least that they remembered, and I just thought that was so mind boggling. I couldn't imagine what it's like to not remember a single dream for an entire month.
Mark
One type of dream I tend to remember is a recurring dream. So I'm taking a class in school, but I haven't been to the class all semester, and I know for some reason that there's a midterm test or something in the class that day, but I have no idea where the classroom is — and as I walk around aimlessly looking for the room, I realize that I'm really late. I wish I remembered my dreams more often. They seem to straddle some space between here and there, wherever there is. It's an interesting place to visit.
Anita Rao
That was Catherine, Grace and Mark. I love hearing their stories, because I've had my own version of each of those dreams. When I first got my dog Oliver, I had a recurring dream that I left town and forgot that I left him home all alone. To this day, I still have the same stress dream that I had in high school: That I arrived late having forgotten to prepare for an AP Calculus exam. And that story about a creative idea coming to me in a dream, I am far from the only person to have had that experience. Just ask Paul McCartney, Edgar Allan Poe or director Christopher Nolan. Turns out our brains are primed for things to come to us while we're asleep.
Angel Morgan
There's kind of a loosening up, and it's just a more welcoming environment in some ways for creativity.
Anita Rao
That's Angel Morgan. She's a past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and a professor of transpersonal psychology at Sofia University. She's also a dream worker — someone who helps folks understand the relationship between their dreams or dreaming selves and their creativity.
Angel Morgan
First and foremost, a dream is an experience during sleep, and we have four ordinary functions of dreaming: memory consolidation, problem solving, emotional processing and future planning. So the content of our dreams is largely provided by the cortex — the outer gray matter, and that's where we have memories of our lives and things from our lives get mixed in with other creative thinking that happens while we're dreaming. And then the sensory parts of the cortex provide the perceptual details, especially the visual and the auditory centers, and sometimes smell and taste as well but not as often. In my research, on that link between dreams and creativity, I discovered three different directions which there's a flow of energy, and one is from dreams to creativity. An obvious example of that is writing a poem from a dream that you had or a painting or something. And then the other is creativity toward dreams. So that's when, let's say, you've been working on a film set all day, and then you have a dream, and you're still working on the film set. There's creativity happening, or maybe a problem with what's happening on the film set is getting worked out in the dream to bring an idea back. And that leads to the next way that it flows, which is back and forth in a conversation between waking and dreaming between dreams and creativity. And I call that dream bridging as a verb. So the word dream bridge, I like to use that as a verb. And so to dream bridge is to consciously transform an experience during sleep into a creative form of expression that can be shared with others in waking life.
Anita Rao
Dreambridge is also the name of the organization Angel founded and directs. It provides resources and education on the link between dreams and creativity. If you're interested in mining your dream content but are one of those folks who seldom remembers their dreams, Angel has a few suggestions of where you can start.
Angel Morgan
There are two things that I look at to begin with for people, and that is dream incubation and dream journaling as kind of bookends of the sleep experience. So dream incubation is going into the dream — as you're relaxing and creating your space for sleep and having good sleep hygiene and all of that — making sure you have all your electronics off, creating a nice environment and then writing down what it is you would like solved or something that's on your mind you'd like to work on in a dream that is kind of an invitation to your dreaming mind to get involved. Then the recall starts happening for people who don't remember their dreams. Making the intention to remember them, and then the other side of it is journaling when you wake up. Having a dream journal right next to your bed, right next to your pillow or somewhere very easily accessible, or your phone — but something easily accessible that you enjoy using that feels natural. If it is a journal, I like sketch books, different pens and markers and pencils that feel good that I enjoy using. But it's up to the dreamer of what they want to use. The main thing is creating that conversation back and forth.
Anita Rao
You are reluctant to tell people what their dreams mean, or kind of interpret dreams for them. Tell me about that, and how you encourage people to think about making meaning from their dreams if that's something their interested in?
Angel Morgan
Right, so telling people what their dreams mean can be harmful. But one thing that is really a better approach is to honor the fact that everyone has the capability to figure out what their dreams mean for themselves, and there are different ways of exploring that.
Anita Rao
So you're really priming the pump to kind of build this relational experience between the dreaming and the waking state, but I'm curious about times when what you're dreaming about — the content of your dreams — doesn't necessarily tell you what it appears to be telling you on the surface. You're having a lot of dreams about death, for example, or dreams that are very violent. That doesn't necessarily mean that there is some violence in your life or there is death in your life. So talk to me about the moments in which dreams are not necessarily a reflection or a real interpretation of our reality?
Angel Morgan
So everyone gets to learn their own dream language. We all have our own associations with things, but most ordinary dreams tend to speak in symbols, metaphors, puns we get to figure out for ourselves. Death and dying in dreams, like you just mentioned, is a very, very archetypal symbol of transformation and change, for example. So there may be some dreams that are literal about death, but more often than not, they tend to be metaphors. For teenagers, [they] dream about death a lot because they're going through so much change, so much rapid change and growth in their lives. And it can be very scary for them. They're like: Why am I dreaming about that I died? So it really helps to understand that more often than not dreams about one thing may be in fact something else, and like I said before, I'm not going to tell anyone what their dreams mean, but there are different kinds. And what I do when I work with people and groups, individuals and groups, is explore: What kind of dream is this for you?
Anita Rao
So you talked about how everyone has their own language of dreams, and dreams can mean different things based on your own language. When you're working with kids in particular — how can you help them kind of unpack and make meaning of that language? I'll give you an example. I have a three-year-old nephew, and he's currently in a stage of his life where his storytelling really blurs fact and fiction. And I asked him the other day about his dreams, and he told me that his stuffed animal Bow Wow tells him that he should eat him overnight.
Recorded Audio Between Anita And Navi
Anita
Do you ever have any dreams?
Navi
Uhm, no.
Anita
No?
Navi
Yeah!
Anita
What do you dream about?
Navi
Bow Wow.
Anita
Bow Wow? What happens with Bow Wow?
Navi
Eating Bow wow.
Anita
You eat Bow Wow? What does Bow Wow say overnight when you're sleeping?
Navi
He want me to eat him.
Anita
He wants you to eat him? Do you and Bow Wiw go on any adventures overnight?
Navi
No. We just sleep!
Anita
And like that was the extent of what he could tell me about what happened when he dreamed, and I didn't really know where to go from there in the conversation. I was kind of just like: Okay! But what would you do next? Like, how can you encourage that conversation with a kid?
Angel Morgan
Well, first, I would say: That's a really good dream. You know, to tell children that's a really good dream. Even when they're having nightmares: That's a really good dream, because I don't discern good and bad with children with dreams like that, because I want them to understand that it's okay and dreams are coming to help them. If I were in your shoes, I would ask my nephew to draw the dream. You know, get out some crayons and draw the dream and look at it together and say: Wow, look at that. Just develop an appreciation for the dreaming and the sharing and not necessarily going intellectually into the meaning of it. So helping support children with their imagination and saying: Oh, what an imaginative dream. I love that. So Bow Wow wanted you to eat him? Why did Bow Wow want you to eat him? Just have a playful conversation about: Well, how does that make you feel? Do you feel good about eating Bow Wow?
Anita Rao
It is hard for me to imagine keeping a straight face while saying: How do you feel about eating Bow Wow? But hey, I am just the aunt, not the parent. So maybe it'll be easier to have these conversations with him in a few years, but I do feel encouraged to start exploring my own dreams more. And it's wild because just thinking more about dreams as we've been putting together this show has led me to remembering more of them and asking more folks to tell me their dream stories. And the results have been fascinating.
Matt
I'm standing in the driveway of my childhood home, and there's a canopy of trees overhead, so I can't see the sky but the light is sort of dim and soft. Like it's sort of twilight, and I'm just standing there looking at my parents house. And I feel something crawling around on my hand, and I look down and there's a bee sort of just walking on my finger. And I'm just watching it. And then the bee stings me on my finger, and it falls off. And as it falls off it leaves a thread connecting its body to where it stung me on my finger.
Mark
The strangest dream I think I've had, I had after a dear friend of mine, who happened to be a dog named Bear, died. Bear visited me in a dream, and he was able to speak. He looked at me with his kind and loving eyes and he said only one thing to me. He said: I miss the butter marbles. When I woke up, I remembered the dream, and I was kind of scratching my head wondering what Bear meant. Then a day or so later it hit me. I used to throw Bear pieces of popcorn when we were sitting together in my living room.
Anita Rao
Those were excerpts from the dream lives of Matt and Mark. There was a period of time recently that a ton of people got really into their dreams — way back in season one of the pandemic. On Twitter folks were writing with #Corona Dreams about the many vivid, bizarre and emotionally charged adventures their brain was taking them on overnight. For me, there are many I could point right back to pandemic anxiety —dreams about forgetting my mask or being in a large crowd of people without a way to escape. Dream afficionado Chris Ufere had some unusual pandemic dreams, too, and paid close attention to some particular patterns.
Chris Ufere
I noticed, I'll say about three main changes. First, who I dreamt about. While I was just living my life, during the quarantine, I dreamt about my family members and my pets more than ever. They were on my mind, because it was one of the most stressful periods of my life. Also, I call this the Zoom effect. I dreamt a lot more about my coworkers or bosses or friends. Through FaceTime or Zoom or on Skype — that's how we interacted during the pandemic, and I noticed that I even had dreams that I was talking to someone through a computer. That never happened to me before in my life. And then last, and I think funniest, I call this one the Netflix effect. I started dreaming about celebrities or fictional characters from the TV shows I was watching the most in the pandemic.
Anita Rao
Chris is the founder and CEO of UDreamed, a free service that lets you log your dream content and analyze it. You can even compare and contrast your dream log with people around the world. After noticing the COVID dream phenomenon, Chris and other UDreamed researchers analyzed 3,000 pandemic dreams, and one finding that particularly piqued my interest, of course, was an increase in dreams about sex and relationships.
Chris Ufere
People were dreaming more about sexual interactions and their partners. They were dreaming about non-partner romantic interests less — so people who weren't their girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, or wife —and were dreaming about their partners more. And this may be because they were not at work around those non-partner romantic interests. And there's some speculation that the increase could be associated with a baby boom later this year or early next year.
Anita Rao
That's so interesting. So in terms of like the focus on those emotionally charged or sexually charged dreams, what did y'all figure out about why that might be happening for folks?
Chris Ufere
So being cooped up, being around your romantic partners far more — we had the surmise that perhaps people just had a lot of pent up energy that they took with them to bed. And this is one of the theories about dreams that research has shown that we carry specific emotions to bed each night and dream about them. So to us, it seemed that people were taking a lot of this energy — this sexual energy — and dreaming about it.
Anita Rao
Chris and Angel are definitely on the same page that no matter what the content is of a dream, there's probably something to learn from it — even if it's just a reminder to pay more attention to your emotional life. But there is a distinction to make here. Dreams can be strange, and bad dreams can even be uncomfortable, but once dreams are affecting your sleep to the point of waking you up abruptly, that's when a bad dream becomes a nightmare.
Michael Nadorff
A nightmare is essentially a bad dream that leads to a startled awakening. So it's that you wake up very startled. Your heart's racing. You're sweating — that sort of thing. Whereas a bad dream is where you wake up and there's a negative dream that didn't have that startling effect that a nightmare has.
Anita Rao
That's Michael Nadorff. Part of his research as an associate professor of psychology at Mississippi State University is to determine what causes nightmares and what stops them. Before he takes us into it, a heads up that we are going to be talking briefly about suicidal thoughts and ideation. So, the cause of nightmares.
Michael Nadorff
Often they start in childhood. About 20% of us experienced nightmares frequently in childhood. Some of that is just challenges with emotion regulation and that coming out in our dreams. Also, of course, trauma happens to a lot of us, and we know that trauma can often lead to nightmares. And in the short term, right after a trauma it's thought that that may be very healthy. That that may be part of the body's own exposure therapy to try to get over whatever happened. But also longer term, often those that have had trauma will have those dreams persist.
Anita Rao
So you work with folks both who are having nightmares from an experience of PTSD, this intense trauma, and others who are just having recurring nightmares — maybe not necessarily linked to a specific trauma. What makes them come to you? What makes [a nightmare] clinically significant? At what point are they not just kind of in our normal sleeping pattern?
Michael Nadorff
Oh, that's a great question. We actually did a study, and we found that of those with notable nightmares, — with nightmares that really should be treated — only a third had ever told any health care professional at any point. So often we aren't approached, because I think people don't realize. But typically the threshold we have is when you have more than one nightmare a week or more. And at that point, especially if it's having an impact on your life, and it's not immediately after a trauma, that's where we say it's probably worth seeing someone to see if we can help with that.
Anita Rao
That offer of help comes in the form of three words: Image Rehearsal Therapy.
Michael Nadorff
It's one of those things [that] seems so simple, you question how it could work, but it works really well, and there's a lot of research behind that. So what we actually do is we take the old dream, [and] we have the person change it any way they want — change who's in it; change where you're at; change anything about it — have superpowers if you want. And then we have them practice that new dream using visual imagery for about five to 10 minutes twice a day. And usually one of two things will happen, either they'll stop having that old dream, or in some cases, [they] will start having the new dream, which is also always really interesting.
Anita Rao
So one of the reasons that this works is because nightmares are actually kind of a self-reinforcing behavior. Could you explain that to us a little bit?
Michael Nadorff
Absolutely. So think of it, for instance, if you're afraid of dogs, and you see a dog, the first instinct is to run away. And as soon as we run away, that takes that anxiety, that fear, away. So it reinforced him, so that next time we see a dog, we're likely to run away again. We're likely to escape. I believe that nightmares are essentially an escape behavior. I think we have these negative dreams where we want out. We want to escape, and the escape is that we wake up. And every time we do that, we make it more likely that when we face that feared stimulus in the night, we're going to wake up. And that's why people get into the cycle of having these chronic nightmares.
Anita Rao
So when we take that example, and kind of bring it into the Image Rehearsal Therapy, what would you do to someone who is having a recurring nightmare about this dog, and you're trying to help them work through making that nightmare no longer be a nightmare?
Michael Nadorff
With it, you could do a new dream where instead of being a real dog, it was a stuffed dog. It could be your very friendly dog, or it could be a different animal altogether. Or, I will also build in supernatural things. There could be a force field around you, so even if there was a dog there, it couldn't get to you. So I let the person really guide me on that. But the main thing is always to make sure that, at the end of the day, I want it to be a dream that they'd like to have. That's really important.
Anita Rao
Michael says that people have seen results from Image Rehearsal Therapy in as little as a few days, especially if they make the image rehearsal a daily practice. Getting quick and tangible results can save lives in some cases. This link between nightmares and mental health is something Michael discovered when he first got into nightmare therapy by way of suicide prevention.
Michael Nadorff
So nightmares are very robustly associated with suicide. And I'll be honest, I started as a skeptic, and there is literature showing the link, and I thought surely it was associated and caused by something else. So in my master's thesis, way back, I looked at the impact of nightmares and insomnia and suicidal behavior, and found that nightmares were still associated after statistically accounting for depression, anxiety and PTSD. There's a study that's not mine, but Hedstrom and colleagues did this really cool study, where they had 165 individuals who had previously attempted suicide. And they followed them for two years looking at what factors actually predict future attempts. And if you had nightmares, not only were you more likely to attempt suicide in the future, you were more than four times as likely. What I think is exciting about that, and I know it's weird to say exciting, but it's exciting because we have treatments for this. And so what's exciting is there's a small amount of data — we're still very early in it — but showing that treating nightmares does seem to potentially lower suicide risk. So I think it's a neat way to possibly add an intervention into what we're already doing to hopefully get better outcomes and to save lives.
Anita Rao
Michael's desire to help rid folks of nightmares is so genuine that he's willing to help anyone who wants advice seriously.
Michael Nadorff
First, I'll give you a resource, and then I'll give you an offer. So the resource is, there's actually an app for Android and iPhone, called Dream EZ, and it was put together by the Department of Defense and the VA. So, [there's] no cost on it. It's an IRT-based — Imagery Rehearsal Therapy — based app. And it works. Yeah, we've actually done some research on it in my lab where we just told people: Go download it and use it. And we saw a significant decrease in nightmares just from doing that. So if you don't have access to therapy, that's one thing. The offer I'll make is if you're dealing with nightmares, and you're struggling to find someone to help you, you're welcome to contact me. Now, I'm only licensed in Mississippi. But what I'll do is either — I can help if I know someone in your area — I can help you find someone. Or if you have a therapist or someone that you're already seeing, I'm happy to consult with them to help them know how to do it, because it's just something that most of us were never trained on. But it's information I want to share. And I do that free of charge, because I really want other people to know about this intervention, because I think it's that important.
Anita Rao
You can find Michael's contact information on our website or give him a Google, Michael Nadorff, N, A, D, O, R, F, F. And if you're seeking help for yourself, or someone else, you can call the suicide prevention hotline 24/7. That number is 800-273-8255. And before we go, here's another invitation to start investigating your own dream world and listening to others. One last dream story from someone who had no problem interpreting what his dreaming mind was trying to tell him.
Guest
So I'm in the middle of the desert, and I see all around me are these really lush, green Lion King-looking trees. So I wanted to start walking out to them. And as I'm walking, I have no idea how I missed this, but I'm stopped because I see this giant like, half melted — you know that movie annihilation, like straight out of that movie — zombie-looking elephant, so I get scared. It doesn't notice me, but it's roaming around, and I know it's looking for me. So I turn around. Immediately I'm confronted by this like four times the size of a normal cougar, again, very scary looking thing, looking for me. It doesn't see me by the way. So I freak out again, and I run in another direction, and I see this like mildly creepy looking raccoon who's also looking for me. All these animals in the dream are looking for it, but none of them can see me, so I'm terrified — and all of a sudden, I look up, and I see the trees that I was trying to get to. There's one sitting right next to me, and I noticed in the dream that its shadow is protecting me. The shadow of the tree is protecting me, and that's pretty much the end of the dream. I know the dream was God telling me: Look, my dude, I got you. I got you, my dude. I got you — but that's one of the weirdest dreams I've ever had.
Anita Rao
Embodied is production of North Carolina Public Radio WUNC, a listener-supported station. If you want to lend your support to this podcast and WUNC's other shows on demand, consider a contribution at wunc.org now. Incredible storytelling like you hear on Embodied is only possible because of listeners like you. This episode was produced by Kaia Finley and Elizabeth Friend. Jenni Lawson is our sound engineer and Quilla wrote our theme music. The show is supported by Weaver Street Market, a worker and consumer owned cooperative, selling organic and local food at four triangle locations in North Carolina. Now featuring online shopping with next day pick-up: weaverstreetmarket.coop. If you enjoyed this show, share about it on social media and tag us. It helps new people find our show and it means so much. Until next time. I'm Anita Rao — taking on the taboo with you.