| For today's Sunday with Sisson, I'm talking about dreams. Not sure if something different is in the air, but I sure am having more vivid dreams than ever before. Almost everyone I speak to on a regular basis is having the same experience at night: dreams, and dreams that they can remember, consistently. What's going on? I don't know. I don't profess to know, nor do I subscribe to any explicitly "supernatural" ideas. What I suspect is that the "zeitgeist" (for lack of a better word), the physiological trends set in place by the unique situation almost everyone finds themselves in these days is shifting the way people sleep and dream. Who knows how it's happening.
One theory I have is that people are dealing with more trauma than usual. Between COVID, elections, political upheaval, a tumultuous economy, and everything else 2020 seems to be throwing in our general direction, people are on edge. Many people think the world is falling apart. And no matter what you think is the objective truth on all those things or whether people should feel a certain way, the fact remains that people feel the way they feel. Feelings feel real. What's trauma is subjective, but what's subjective feels objective. Where do dreams come in? Matthew Walker, author of Why We Sleep, says that REM sleep (dream sleep) is therapy for emotional trauma. It's how our subconscious selves self-treat and work through problems we're having in waking life (or problems we don't know we're having but are). I feel fine. I'm confident we'll get through all this. But there could be a part of me, unbeknownst to my conscious self, that's worried, that's dealing with some stuff. And maybe that part, if it indeed exists, feels the need to work through all the stuff with dreams. Are you dreaming more these days (or nights)? Are the dreams more vivid, more memorable than normal? Let me know in the comment section of Friday's Weekly Link Love. | 