In the Spring of 2020, I ran a college radio show in the height of COVID from my tiny dorm room with a big idea – creating soundtracks to people’s dreams. The show, titled Dreamland, did not quite work out the way that I had first intended.
I hoped to interview a different person each week, hear the stories of a recent or impactful dream they’d had, and work with them to compile music that fit to the feelings, ideas, or themes of that dream. It was going to be a way to build new connections and encourage intimacy through the sharing of a topic that really interested me. In reality, however, COVID severely limited my interaction with my peers who weren’t already my friends, restricting my access to a wide array of voices. Further, what really left me stumped was the question of if dreams can really be storied at all.
In the first episode of the show, I formulated a soundtrack to my very own dream – and realized it was a near-impossible task.
As I experience my own dreams, they are all about aura and emotions; in many ways, indescribable. Primary feelings of joy, fear, and anger are potent, and leave a residual impact even after waking. The narrative itself, however, is blurry. Is it a narrative at all?
In an education class I am currently enrolled in, “Stories Children Tell,” we have been exploring just what the title suggests – stories, and the meanings, uses, and insights they allow in children's lives. One question to which we have repeatedly returned is a seemingly basic one – what is a story?
On the very first day, we determined that a story has a “tick” and a “tock” – one thing which causes another.
Speaking from personal dream experience, as well as the good number that friends have sleepily shared with me over breakfast, dreams only have this sometimes.
Often, yes, one event leads to the next, possibly eerily like it does in waking life. But other times, things simply happen. I can count many more times that I have told a dream that went something like this: “My teeth fell out and then suddenly I was in the grocery store, wandering around and looking for someone, who I now can’t place.” These events often have no rhyme or reason to our conscious brains. We end up in places without knowing how and we do things with little understanding as to why. We are often given all of the action with none of the context. Asleep, this seems okay, even normal, but in waking life, context feels vital.
In fact, this is part of what “we” – particularly the white, middle class understanding of linguistics that permeates our classrooms – teach in guiding young children to narrate their experiences. In her 1981 article about “Sharing Time” in a 1st grade classroom, Sarah Micheals details this as she analyzes a white teacher’s interactions with her students. The teacher, often at the expense of her Black students’ narrative style, repeatedly tries to encourage her students to focus on one event or object and provide ample background detail, not allowing them to assume that the listeners inherently understand the context of the situation. What “we”, as a dominant culture, often consider to be “good” stories provide at least enough of this information for us to grasp the gist of the account. Dreams, on the other hand, often fail to supply this.
Still, this lack of context does not divorce dreams from our class definition of stories completely. Beyond the “tick” and “tock,” on our first day of class, we also determined non-canonicality – the occurrence of something “out of the ordinary” – to be integral to a story. Dreams are generally not lacking here. While they may often feel relatively unremarkable at the time, it, once again, only takes waking to quickly comprehend the absurdity or intensity of the situation. This tension within dreams is likely not a coincidence, but a sign of our unconscious participating in difficult processing, meaning-making, and identity-formation work similar to that which we do through stories.
In a 2007 paper, professors Mclean, Pasupathi, and Pals make the argument that “storytelling is related to both the development and maintenance of the self,” (p. 273) uncovering the cyclical creation of self through the stories we tell and, then, stories through self as well. They claim that in telling stories, we determine what is important to be included in our larger autobiographical understanding of what has happened in our lives. In my own experience, dreams hold a similar function.
When I was barely four years old my family moved across the country from Atlanta, GA to Boulder, CO. Being so young at the time of this event, I remember little about my years in Georgia. Throughout my life, since, however, I have repeatedly dreamt of the house in which we lived, serving as a setting for a plethora of seemingly unrelated dreamscapes. Because of this, I recall (or at least think I recall) the house in a fair amount of detail. Likely, I also probably dream about this house because I remember it, because it served as such a central location in my young life. The formation of my greater understanding of my life, and, in this, my self, has been shaped by my dreams, and vice versa. According to Rebecca M. C. Spencer of “Frontiers for Young Minds,” dreams, through replay, help our memories be moved from the hippocampus – the part of the brain that stores short term memory – to other parts for permanent storage, reinforcing this concept that dreams are are a method of cataloging, contributing to self-formation.
Interestingly enough, of course, I may never know, without returning to it, if this dream-concept of my childhood home is true. It’s not unlikely that it has been shaped and changed over time by accounts from my parents and sister, photographs I have seen, and my experiences in all of the other spaces I have been in since living there. This is the case with stories, too. As time, distance, audience, and new experience colors our outlook on past events, the narratives we tell are constantly altered in accordance. Due to our basic humanity, unbiased, “reliable” narrators are impossible to find. In both dreams and stories, however, in most cases, the importance does not lie in their unequivocal “truth,” but rather in their power.
This power, perhaps most potently, is portrayed through dreams’ and stories’ role in meaning-making, understanding, and healing from traumatic events. In a 2019 article titled “The Functional Role of Dreaming in Emotional Processes,” Scarpeli et. al. break down their extensive research on the experience of dreaming, asserting that it allows for a space to process traumatic memories when our ability to do so in waking life is hindered. Dr. Michael J. Breus (2020) explains that this occurs due to a shut-down of a portion of our brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during sleep, which allows for “an unselfconscious free flow of emotion within dreams.” Our brains, essentially, are designed specifically to use the time while we sleep to work through that which may feel difficult to think about in waking life.
This function of dreams reaches farther than an individual, too. In most religions and cultural traditions, especially non-Western ones, dreams are esteemed for related reasons. Alessandro Casale, for example, in their research on dreams in Indigenous cultures of North and South America, spoke to three members of the Abenaki people located across what is now called New England and Southeastern Canada about their understandings of, and relation to, dreams. Denise and Paul Pouliot and Kathleen Blake expressed that dreams were ways, in their lives, to connect and communicate with ancestors and serve as warnings or indications of what’s to come. As just one example of many’s experiences, their sharings represent and indicate dreams’ role as “a form of survivance, an effort to keep native traditions and history alive through stories, remembrance, resistance and preservation of language.”
This is similar – and entangled with – the work that storytelling does on a collective level, maintaining memory and relationship while building intimacy, trust, and empathy. Here, it seems, dreams and stories intersect in their roles as tools in healing large-scale, generational violence and trauma such as genocide. In sum, these mediums play vital roles in moving both individuals and communities forward through meaningful remembrance of and healing from the past.
I dream most vividly – or maybe simply remember my dreams most – when I sleep somewhere new. In the first few nights as I transition to or from school, when I sleep in my partner or a friend’s bed, or simply drift off on the couch, on a plane, in the car, my dreams are loud and memorable. Something within my body seems to be taking note of the non-canonicality. The question of whether or not dreams – in their jumbled messy nature – are inherently, or precisely, stories is not one with an easy answer – especially as we continue to explore what makes a story in the first place. Regardless, though, it feels that dreams exist in a way and for a reason awfully similar to that of stories.
Maybe the existence of dreams is our body’s intrinsic, biological even, proclivity for story-making. Centuries of tradition, countless psychological studies, and immeasurable pleasure and entertainment seem to agree – we are meant to tell stories.
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