Cruising the River of Dreams

Story by Sanna Bjork & Jane Pham

Sitting by the river, looking up to the sky full of stars, and you start to see yourself in another scenery. It can be dreamy and beautiful, but it can be scary and terrifying. Eyes opening with a little pity, you ask, “why can’t I live in there just a bit more?” or “lucky, it was not real.” Everything you do, you could control it even when you are cruising down the river of your dreams.

Let’s dive into your dreams and their meaning with Dr. Kara Gabriel, professor of psychology who teaches a class on dreaming, Robert Waggoner, the former president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD), who has written several books on lucid dreaming, and Tea Green, CWU Art major student who put her dreams into artworks last quarter during the quarantine. They share information about dreams and lucid dreaming.

Definition of dream

Dr. Gabriel explains that the scientific reason for dreaming is our brain seems to be awake because the visual cortex, which is located at the back of your brain, is active. This is how your visual memories and the memory centers are pulled up. 

At that time, Dr. Gabriel says, you cannot enact your dream due to the muscles locked down. However, there is a caveat to this: some sleep disorders could affect the ability to control your dream, which means you can “sleep and act out your dream,” she continues. Isn’t it amazing to live in your dreams just like how you live in your awake time?

Meaning of your dreams

Dr. Gabriel explains that dreams could be a way your brain can “go back over what you did today and try to figure out what was important.” Plus, dreams could be a way for your brain to let you know what your brain should keep, what you should get rid of or pay attention to.

Besides the fact that your brain tries to “study material that happened” in your day, they sometimes tell you “about bigger things that you may not even realize that your brain is trying to deal with,” Gabriel shares.

She talks about her dream as an example of how our brain takes time to comprehend everything- “people with masks.” “I'm afraid when people get too close to me without their mask in my dreams,” she interprets her dreams of how she feels about this pandemic. Also, it takes a while into the pandemic for her to start dreaming about this, which shows a delay for your brain to try figuring out what is happening.

How to have a brighter morning with your bad dreams

 “Dreams are a continuation of your daily life,” says Dr. Gabriel. Depends on how your day goes, your dream would also let you know. If you are going through something depressing, then you can feel and see the worries and anxiety in your dreams. 

So, it depends on your dream to consider if you have a good or not-so-good sleep. But you do not have to continue to experience bad dreams. Gabriel shares a trick for you to “cut your dreaming down” by “setting your alarm earlier” than your usual wake-up time in order to walk out of your dream. By doing that, your mood could be improved.

Understanding your dreams

Sharing with you, Tea Green mentions her way of understanding her dreams- dream journaling. During the quarantine, she has dreams that are “really troubled” and “traumatic” that bring Green to attention to her mental health, her anxieties. By writing down her dreams, she can look at it like “a rational looking glass” to figure out certain things that make her feel how she feels. Besides her mental health or her anxieties, Green believes that she could step back to look at her relationships with people around her to see the issues and address them.

Besides writing down her dreams on her phone, she brings them to art by “scribbling it down.” Those would be a movie for her to rewatch, she says. 

Appreciate your dreams

Dreams tell you about what is going on in your life. Have you thought of yourself not being able to dream anymore? There is a disorder called “fatal familial insomnia” that causes us to stop dreaming due to the incapability of sleeping, which means you cannot dream anymore, shared by Dr. Gabriel.

Dreams could be disturbing or terrifying but “ignoring them does more harm than good,” Green shares. What you need to do is “addressing, addressing the terror of the terrifying dream and analyzing it in order to kind of go into the real world, and fix whatever problem you're subconsciously holding on to is more beneficial, at least in my experience.”

Dream Recall

There is also the issue of why people remember some dreams and not others. According to Waggoner, “As we sleep, about every 90 minutes we go into the dream state.” These dreams start off short and increase in length throughout the night until you wake up. 

That last dream at the end of the night would be the easiest for someone to recall (Waggoner). Waggoner says the brain also shifts between two different systems as we wake up, and this process can cause your dreams to disappear from your memory.

Those who use cannabis or drink alcohol are also likely to not recall the dreams they had. It is believed that cannabis and alcohol affect dream recall, rather than the ability to dream.

After long term cannabis use stops, Waggoner says people experience what is known as a rim rebound where dreams will seem more vivid, involved, and longer because you are noticing them.

Lucid Dreaming

Some people also experience the awareness that they have in a dream, this is referred to as lucid dreaming. Waggoner has been a lucid dreamer for 40 years and recommends lucid dreaming for several reasons. “One of the great benefits of lucid dreaming is just how much fun it is,” says Waggoner.

According to Waggoner, lucid dreaming happens naturally and only about half the population reports having them.

But there are a couple of other reasons that could provide benefits to some people. For those with recurring nightmares, lucid dreaming can aid in resolving them. 

Waggoner also mentions that artists have used it to help them create amazing works of art and athletes have used it to improve their performance without the physical risks. And finally, it can help people understand what their dreams mean because you can ask dream figures “who are you and what do you represent,” explains Waggoner.

Techniques for Lucid dreaming

If you are trying to learn to lucid dream, there are about 20 different techniques. According to Sleep Foundation, these techniques include waking and going back to bed in the night, having external stimuli, writing dreams down, making sure a bedroom is ideal for sleep, and many others. Waggoner recommends the power of suggestion.

Green says that she started using dream journaling at a young age, as an attempt to help her lucid dream more.

Before you go to bed, tell yourself things like “tonight in my dreams I will be more critically aware, and when I see something strange, I will realize I am dreaming”. For Green, the absurdities in her dreams are what usually triggers her lucid dreams.

  Though there are many variations on how ways to experience dreams, all people are dreamers. So, keep on dreaming and if you want to change your dream experience, try some pre-sleep induction techniques, or spend a little time when you wake up recall what you dreamed. Just enjoy the cruising, you’ll find many interesting things about yourself.