the world is built at night

welcome to A Teetering Vulture! a newsletter about various science stuff as well as the life happenings of its author, Taylor.

Femurs—tibias—there are already perhaps a hundred arranged in neat rows in here—in the back of this SUV, on this barren hillside in the middle of the desert. Some of the bones are dusty, some aren’t, but none of them are perfectly white. None of them are shaped exactly the same. Meticulously puzzling out the configuration of bones that will fulfill the car’s maximum capacity for bones is the main challenge here.

Recurrently distracting are the kittens on the mailboxes. There are at least four mailboxes on the hillsides—each one is hosting at least three unsteady, clambering kittens. If I open the door of one of the mailboxes, let it flop downwards, there would probably be a kitten wobbling around in there. I do this and am proven right.

Beyond the hill loom sharp, white, disturbingly large wind turbines. That is to say, normal-sized wind turbines, which are disturbingly large.

When I wake up, it takes me all of an hour to start describing this dream to Dasha. I’ve recently been writing a story about dreams, and so I’ve been doing a lot of listening to stories of peoples’ dreams. I’ve also been paying more attention than usual to my own dreams. Having just returned from a road trip in the American southwest, I’ve started having desert-themed dreams—odd rivers running through odder mansions in a sandy, blank stretch of land in Texas. This bone-stacking dream. I’ve also dreamt about a girl flirting with me by asking me to check to make sure her fingers aren’t broken—about a woman in Gaza sitting on a blanket reading me a poem—about crashing a plane on France’s border in the snow—about body horror too uncomfortable to recount—about floating in space looking down on Earth, surrounded by great floating chunks of land, mountains of crumbly brown soil and vibrant green trees and other foliage.

There is an author whom I love, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who said this about herself in her book Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, which I read several years ago: “I rarely share my dreams because I believe dreams are only fascinating to the person who had them.”

For most of my life, I’ve shared this perspective with AKR. Why would a bizarre story that only happened in my head, that I did not consciously create, interest anyone other than me? Prior to recently, I wasn’t ever particularly held rapt by anyone else’s dream anecdotes, either.

But since acquiring an interest in dreams as a result of a writing project, and since doing the research that has resulted in this article, I’ve begun to be convinced that others’ dreams may be widely considered boring only because a large chunk of Western society has decided that they are boring. Not necessarily because they are inherently boring.

There are of course, however, already those who don’t think that—who don’t believe that dreams are boring, who don’t believe that dreams are the mostly meaningless products of the machinations of our unconscious soup of mind chemicals. I approached this research all from a non-religious, logical perspective. Generally speaking, I don’t believe in magic. I don’t know if I’m in the majority here or not—I am (or was) simply in AKR’s camp, her approximate version of reality-ish, where dreams are fascinating to the dreamer and also often weird and may incorporate aspects of meaning but are, at the end of the day, not really worth telling anyone else about.

But If you Google ‘purpose of dreams,’ or ‘types of dreams,’ or ‘characteristics of dreams,’ or anything else in this vein, the search results will probably be rampant with articles claiming that if a dream has some specific theme or plot, it has a certain undeniable meaning—and that you can learn something about yourself and maybe even make positive changes to your life if you merely interpret your dream correctly. Many of the these articles seem to suggest dreams are something to actively consider and contemplate, and therefore are of interest and worth discussing.

But—dream interpretation. This approach to looking at dreams—it feels similar to ideas of psychic abilities and prescience. Things regarded by me to be nonexistent. If someone tells me they can predict the future, I am not going to feel anything other than immense skepticism. If someone tells me they are dreaming about being chased by a tiger because they are scared of the anger they harbor deep within their soul, I’m also going to be reasonably dubious.

That said, I do admit: it seems like any time I’m really stressed, I almost always dream about horses. And I have asked myself, what the hell could that mean?

As I gathered more and more stories of other peoples’ dreams, I also started to become genuinely curious about what they meant. Though, not in the sense of ‘this dream’s theme surely means this specific thing for everyone, including you’ or ‘this predicts this about your life or your future,’ but instead I wanted to know what context may have produced a specific dream and all of its intricacies, and what it said about the life that person was living. I was becoming interested in other peoples’ dreams in a similar way that I am interested in other peoples’ art, or writing, or any other form of personal expression. What can a person’s dreams tell me about the human experience here on Earth? What can they say, for any given person, about life and death and society and love and fear and silliness and earnestness and all the other topics that fascinate all of us? If they can say anything meaningful about those things at all? Although, my intuition was telling me they probably could.

And so of course I dug deeper than Google search results. I read what anthropologists, neuroscientists, and psychologists have for decades and sometimes centuries been saying about dreams. And I came away certain of two things: one, dreaming serves a critical-to-life, multifold purpose for humans—and two, sharing our dreams with one another is an ancient practice that has been imperative to our construction and maintenance of successful social communities. As Dr. Murray Wax, an anthropologist who before his death in 2012 worked for decades at Washington University studying indigenous North American cultures, including the roles dreams played in their societies, says in a paper about dream sharing: “dreaming is essential, not just for the dreamer but as a stabilizing element of group life.”

So: the biological function of dreams. Why, while in a daily quiescent period, do humans vividly hallucinate? Why are we usually oblivious to and out of control of those hallucinations until leaving that quiescent period?

From an evolutionary perspective, dreaming as humans experience it has been selected for as a trait that helps us survive. Though it may have left early humans vulnerable and disoriented in environments where people still had to worry about physical attack and other environmental peril, dreaming did—and thus, because that’s how evolution operates, still does—an abundance of beneficial things for us: it helps us consolidate memories and integrate them into our perceptions of ourselves and our world; it helps us regulate our emotions; it helps us think more creatively and solve problems; and it also helps us prepare for our waking life.

Each of these functions has been distinguished as separate from the functions of sleep. For instance, researchers have found that human memory improves during certain stages of REM sleep, the stages when humans have been found to dream more complexly and richly, often in story-like narratives, than in other stages of sleep. It’s also been found that items and specific pieces of learning that show up in dreams lead to better memory retention of those items and of that learning. In other words: it’s dreaming that allows for memory consolidation, not sleeping. Scientists have had to learn how to distinguish between the functions of the two, and investigate a complexity of neurophysiology that extends beyond simply looking at dreaming only during REM sleep (so, while the memory improvement during REM example is valid, it’s not at all the whole story). The additional phenomenological component of dreaming in comparison with sleeping—the latter of which is a primarily physiological experience and involves much less conscious experience than dreams—means that its functions have to be considered beyond those of the biological and neural processes involved, as well.

Scientists have also found that dreaming helps us process emotional events in our lives. It’s thought that we do this by using dreams to recall emotional information while decoupling it from the intense emotions that were involved in real life, and in doing so essentially regulating ourselves and achieving a kind of emotional balance through catharsis. Evidence of this has been found in patterns of rapid eye movement during sleep, which change after highly emotional life events and also in people who suffer from depression. Depressed people have different REM patterns on better days than worse days, suggesting a connection between their emotional state and their dreaming.

There is also evidence to suggest that creativity can be cultivated by dreaming, and specifically can increase a person’s ability to make connections between remote ideas, one hallmark of creativity. Several anecdotes, one such being German chemist August Kekule dreaming about an ouroboros and connecting the idea with his search for the structure of the chemical benzene, which he would go on to discover is arranged in a ring, support this notion. Pop culture has also received the gifts of dream-induced creativity; the author of the The Twilight Saga, Stephanie Meyer, crafted her first iconic novel in the series from the remnants of a dream involving vampires.

Perhaps most interesting to me, however, is the capacity for dreams to simulate and prepare us for our life in the waking world. There is an established theory called Simulation Theory, of which there are two subsets, Threat Simulation Theory and Social Simulation Theory, that posits that one function of our dreams is to create a model of the situations and challenges we expect to encounter in our day-to-day lives, and then play out the scenarios and situations created in those models as an “oblivious avatar” in order to teach us how to act and respond to the continuous stimulation of our lives and societies when we are awake. The Threat Simulation Theory says that the reason uncomfortable or scary dreams are so prevalent among humans is because we are mentally rehearsing how to contend with difficult, unpleasant experiences in our lives in a low-stakes environment without actual risk to ourselves. Social Simulation Theory, similarly, explains that one reason we dream is to prime ourselves to navigate the complex interpersonal relationships intrinsic to human existence. Our dreams simulate interactions with the people in our families and communities so as to help us understand how to communicate with them. Researchers have hypothesized that Simulation Theory explains why most people (excluding lucid dreamers) are oblivious while in a state of dreaming: in order for the simulation to play out correctly and have the intended effect, the dreamer needs to be convinced of its authenticity.

Of course, because we are human and because each human brain is unquestionably weird beyond compare, the simulations that we produce are usually not those of exact situations we encounter in life. Still, there is evidence that are brains are trying to model relevant threats and social situations. One study of Canadian university students reported that the most common themes or scenarios in their dreams were 1. being chased or pursued 2. sexual experiences 3. falling 4. school 5. arriving too late 6. someone dying 7. trying to do something again and again 8. flying 9. vividly sensing a presence (as in being aware of a person somewhere, but not seeing or hearing them) and 10. failing an exam. Eight out of ten of these (the exceptions being flying and sensing a presence) are plainly indicative of dreams that present threatening, stressful, emotional, and/or social situations to a dreamer to navigate.

Cross-cultural studies of dreams provide more information about how a person’s world shapes the milieu of their dreams, and additionally how the functions of dreams benefit modern-day humans who nevertheless live in similar socio-ecological conditions in which dreaming evolved to be beneficial. One study that compared two hunter-gatherer communities in Africa, the BaYaka of the Republic of the Congo and the Hadza of Tanzania, with a population of people from Europe and a population of people from Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic, found something particularly striking. The BaYaka and Hadza, who each live as close-knit, highly interdependent communities that face high levels of threats from both large predators and pathogens and parasites, were found to have low-stress, community-oriented dreams that focused on conflict and threat resolution. Both groups from the Global North, in contrast, had dreams that consisted of more negative emotions and higher anxiety, and resolution of problems in dreams was less common. It is interesting and certainly telling that the people in hunter-gatherer communities have dreams that are more often than not effective at regulating dreamers’ emotions and simulating the situations encountered in daily life that are critical for survival, while those raised in the Western world, living in a manner unmistakably severed from their hunter-gatherer ancestors, often dream high stress dreams in which a solution to a problem is not always found.

Lonely people have also been found to have many negative emotions associated with their dreams. People who ruminate on intrusive thoughts at night are more likely to dream about threatening situations. And psychologists sometimes use the ability of dreams to regulate our moods as a tool in therapy, teaching patients to think about something positive before bed, because it will increase the likelihood that a dream will be about something related and positive. The dreams we have are intimately connected to our experiences and contexts in life, as well as our mental states. While I was thinking about this—about who has what kind of dreams and why, I ran an internet poll in which I asked users of one social media site if they had ever died in their dreams (as in, a dreamer experiences their own death). This came after conversations with Madison and Dasha, both of whom have never died in their dreams. I was surprised by this, as it has happened to me multiple times. I started wondering if it was a common, relatable thing. 65.3% of the 248 people who took the poll said they had died in their dreams, a few of whom commented that they die a lot when they dream. Part of me wonders if, in accordance with Simulation Theory, dying in dreams is one way some of us try and process and prepare for death as an inevitability—or prepare for anything that is uncertain and out of our control and potentially inevitable. I have always been extremely fearful of death; at points death has seemed to haunt my thoughts relentlessly. And so perhaps my dreams have taken on this tenor of my thoughts, have become briefly haunted by death as well.

Regardless of how the lives we lead mold the themes of our dreams, ultimately we live the lives we lead because of our dreams. Without dreaming, human beings go insane. They become extremely dysfunctional or nonfunctional. Sleep disorder clinics have observed this in patients with REM disorders and other forms of disordered sleeping that prevent normal dreaming.

We live the contemporary lives we live because we successfully go to bed each night and create odd stories in our heads. We also live the contemporary lives that we live because people in the past dreamed dreams that helped them function in their communal worlds. Similar to the BaYaka and the Hadza, early human groups likely dreamed dreams that helped them prepare for high risk existences where social adeptness was tantamount to survival. Many ancient human cultures also literally created their worlds from their dreams. Dreams seem to exist in a state outside of time and history, which make them categorically akin to myths. Visions and dreams have aided in the creation of culture, from creation stories to rituals and dances to other mythological tales embedded in the realities of humans, for centuries. How many of the stories that inform the world that exists today, with its wealth of folklore and legends, can be attributed to dreams? In some North American indigenous cultures, dreams are ways for people to communicate and forge relationships not just with other humans but with the other living creatures they share their world with. In all of the cultures in which dreams played (or play) a large role in the structure of society, talking about dreams was common. Sharing dreams, rather than keeping them to oneself, meant adding to the architecture of the world and engaging with an important spiritual, creative, almost magical side of human life.

I’d like to reiterate that I adore Amy Krouse Rosenthal and her writings. And I also understood, for a long time, from my perspective as a fellow American Midwesterner, exactly where she was coming from with the idea that others’ dreams are boring. But then Dr. Murray, the late Washington University professor, had to go and say that the way many of us think about dreams is the product of the “increasingly disenchanted, materialistic, reductionist, and routinized” ways of the rational, intellectual West. He had to say that “the evanescent character of dreams, and their creative aesthetic qualities, reveal their origin in the psyche of social beings and their tension in the self-system.” And, well. That’s just too seductive a way to talk about dreams—that sounds too beautiful and interesting for me to resist changing all of my opinions.

Though, luckily, even if some of us aren’t often verbally sharing our dreams with one another, that doesn’t stop the world from being sculpted from our dreams. I’ve been delighted by the jaunt I’ve gone on to come to understand the ways dreams unconsciously help us function and competently move through the world. Just like the body crafts unconscious memory of any learned craft or skill, dreams are remembered by our bodies, and our learning from them is executed in our actions and thoughts every day. Dr. Murray also compares dreams with childhood: in the same way many of our childhood memories may fade, so do our dreams fade, but that amnesia does not diminish the influence they have on us. What we experience as we establish ourselves as people in the world as children sticks with us forever. We reach back into our childhoods constantly for innumerable things. For guidance, for healing, for rekindling playfulness and joy, to seek answers. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke said that childhood is a gift that a person could draw inspiration from forever if they were to never experience anything but aloneness and isolation for the remainder of their life. Recently, I have had such fun romping through the fields of my and others’ dreams that I am inclined to think the same could be said about the gift of dreams.

And if I consider it from an altered perspective, the dream I had about stacking bones in a car does feel like a poem. It had its own impalpable and inimitable feeling—it was deeply affecting and entertaining—it feels like a piece of me rendered artistically, something that I produced from the pieces of my brain that had spent days thinking about how to pack a car for a roadtrip through the desert. I can sense the meaning in it even if I can’t fully discern it, nor want to. It feels important, now, as do other dreams I’ve collected from family and friends lately. They all seem worth sharing, these creations made from the leafing out of our minds at rest—these attempts to capture and digest who we are, so that when we wake, we can know ourselves and our world just a little bit better.

Information for this article was obtained from:

✼ Dr. Murray L. Wax’s Dream Sharing as Social Practice ✼ Multifunctionality of Dreaming and the Oblivious Avatar ✼ Evidence for an emotional adaptive function of dreams: a cross-cultural study ✼ ✼ The Functional Role of Dreaming in Emotional Processes ✼ What Can You Learn From Your Dreams? SciShow Psych ✼ Understanding Dreams: Psychology Today ✼ Characteristics and contents of dreams ✼ Dreaming of being chased reflects waking-life experiences related to negative relationships with others metaphorically ✼ Presleep focusing on positive spontaneous thoughts enhanced the possibility of dreaming of them ✼ Dreaming in Adolescents During the COVID-19 Health Crisis: Survey Among a Sample of European School Students ✼ The Typical Dreams of Canadian University Students ✼ How Dreams Reveal Brain Disorders ✼ Interpersonal Loneliness Predicts the Frequency and Intensity of Nightmares: An Examination of Theoretic Mechanisms ✼ 9 Common Dreams and What They Mean ✼