“I had the craziest dream last night!” We’ve all been there; a friend whips out this line, prefacing an hour-long rant about her shopping trip with Sienna Miller on Pluto before it was demoted from planethood. Although her fantasy has no basis in our own reality, we smile and nod and say, “No, really?” simply to allow our friend the satisfaction of reliving this magical experience.
I found myself in this situation the other day, as a girlfriend related her nocturnal adventures with Russell Crowe. In between smiles and nods, though, I felt more than just the usual boredom; I felt the painful absence of my dream life. I remember well that sated feeling of awakening after a pleasant dream, how it colored the rest of my day in rosy reverie. Of course, I also remember the quickened pulses and cold sweats of nightmare, but it had been years since I had felt either. As my girlfriend described in minute detail her ride with Russell across the Australian outback, I thought more about my dream life—why I’d lost it, why it was important, and how I could get it back.
Science tells us the mechanics of dreaming, how our minds and bodies progress through deep sleep into ninety minute REM cycles of activity. Though we are asleep, our brains, senses, and sexual organs come alive in REM. According to Patricia Garfield, PhD, a dream specialist, the images that appear to us in dreams are stimulated by the internal and external physical sensations we experience throughout the day. Dreams, therefore, awaken us to these sensations that we may have not fully appreciated during our active lives and allow us to process them within the safety of sleep.
What I was missing from my dream life was a richer active life. Without exercising my pleasure senses at night, they felt dull throughout the day. I craved even the most terrifying nightmare as an outlet for daily anxiety and to eclipse those quotidian qualms with the worst that my imagination could produce.
As a woman, dreams are particularly important to me. Greenfield emphasizes how many more life changes women go through than men, and how dreams are necessary to cope with the physical and emotional aspects of these changes. Through the three M’s—menarche, motherhood, and menopause—women are constantly facing new sensations that cannot be contained within a purely waking life.
One major life change for a woman is her sexual awakening. Greenfield also addresses the sexual nature of women’s dreams. During a sexy dream, women experience true physical arousal; our genitals become engorged, and we may experience orgasm. Furthermore, a healthy sexual dream life can actually improve our waking sex lives. We hone our physical senses so that they are more in tune during the real deal, and we can use the fantasies we cultivate in dreams during actual sex play. Freud didn’t just have his pants on too tight; it’s true that dreams can be an agent of sexual desire.
We may not be able to get down to it with that gorgeous cashier at the A&P, but we can live out our fantasy at night and no one else will be the wiser. It is this privacy of dreams that I miss most. Although the science goes far in explaining the mechanics of dreaming, it mostly neglects the creative and spiritual sanctuary that is dream life. In dreams, we feel we reach a higher level of consciousness. If you believe in a higher being, connection to that being may be part of this elevation. The Bible portrays dreams as communications with God, and many indigenous cultures attribute some spiritual or ghostly element to dreams, especially in predicting the future. Whatever we believe, dreams allow us room to explore. Dream life is a part of waking life that is ours alone. Whatever thoughts, emotions, or physical sensations we undergo in dreams are absolutely impenetrable to anyone else unless we choose to divulge them. Dreams provide the safety for our imaginations to run wild; our minds can escape their daily repressions. We can face our fears in dreams, knowing that we can wake up at any time. Without my dream life, I felt I had no private life, nothing to set me apart from the crowd.
