Dreaming of a life less lonely?
You didn’t evolve to be alone with your pain. Dream-sharing is our forgotten medicine.
I dreamed of the beach in Northumberland. It’s bleached out and windswept. I am beyond the dunes. On the flat expanse that will eventually reach the hostile North Sea. I can’t see him, but I know there’s a man buried under the sand. He’s alive but trapped.
I’m kneeling on the sand, half a meter over his head. Bending forward, I place my hands in a diamond shape onto the ground. I don’t try to dig him out, the thought doesn’t occur to me. I’m pushing my palms firmly into the sand. Hoping to send comfort.
The snow falls. In the waking world, this isn’t uncommon in Northumberland. The county sits at the furthest point in England, edging the Scottish border. I know the extra weight of the snow on top of the sand will crush the man.
I build a makeshift tent around myself, and him. Under the tarpaulin, I can hear snow settling above us. I try to lift the plastic covering away so I can get up, but the snow is too heavy to dislodge. Now I’m buried too.
My panic woke me.
As usual, when I opened my eyes, I wrote down my dream before getting out of bed. There was one detail I didn’t include. I had hoped to forget it. Dreams that aren’t transcribed usually fade quickly.
The detail disgusted me. Primal, physical disgust. An undulating tightness starting in my stomach. Pulsing up my throat. Threatening vomit.
The body of the man was frail. It was weak. Powerless.
There’s a colleague at work I chat to sometimes in the morning. Our coffee routines overlap at the machine. Still swirling in my pre-espresso brain, I absent-mindedly recounted the dream. And the lingering sickness it left behind.
I didn’t feel guilty until I glanced over to take a sugar sachet. In his face I saw the violence of my own repulsion.
We have an epidemic of male mental health problems. The suicide rates are at crisis level. Young men talk about the stigma. About the fear of being anything less than always strong. There’s a blank space where love, and care, and psychological intervention should be. The grafters of toxic masculinity have rushed in to fill it.
“Don’t connect,” scream the YouTube alphas. “Dominate! Earn enough, win enough, steal enough, then you will be worthy of love. Once the red Ferrari is in the drive, the perfect woman will appear in the kitchen.”
These weren’t my views. I believed I took deliberate steps to provide the men in my life with a place for vulnerability. I would have told you that men should cry. That I want their emotions and their softness. That I’m part of the solution.
My dream was telling a different story. A message I couldn’t see until it was reflected back to me in my colleague’s reaction.
I was part of the poison.
I might have been doing the right things. Saying the right things. But under the surface, those dangerous lies about what it means to be a man were rotting my insides. The fresh self-knowledge stung.
“In the act of going to sleep we undress not only physically but psychically as well. When our brain gets a signal to start dreaming, there we are in our emotional nudity.” — Montague Ullman
I didn’t mean to confess at the coffee machine that morning. I would have hidden my flaw if I could. From myself. Definitely from my colleague.
There’s a certain type of guilt that burrows under your skin. The sort that doesn’t have a straightforward reparative action. It smells like self-hatred. It infiltrates other interactions. It’s like wearing damp clothes. Social psychologists have found that this kind of guilt makes people very lonely.
The loneliness doesn’t come from their friends rejecting them. From being cast out because of their terrible transgression. It happens because the guilty person doesn’t know how to express their emotions. They get caught up in conflicting priorities.
They want to ease shame. But they don’t want to hurt people around them. They try to remain calm externally. But internally there’s a storm raging. In the confusion they shut down completely, retreating into the safety of isolation.
My traitorous dream about the buried man on the snowy beach betrayed me. It exposed my sin to my colleague. Against my wishes, it broke the spell that ties guilt inevitably to loneliness. It didn’t give me a chance to get lost and withdraw to a private island.
My dream told my secret. It shoved me inelegantly back into sunlit connection with another human. Dreams know shame blooms in the darkness.
Dreams say something about our deepest selves, without censor. They’re pure. Rarely even bothering to hide behind a coherent plot.
Today we carefully fashion ourselves into curated identities and personal brands. Our Instagram posts are filtered and so are our friendships. We thought loneliness was a price worth paying to avoid the mortifying ordeal of being known.
It wasn’t always this way. It isn’t supposed to be this way.
Evolutionary psychologists think dream-sharing started around 40,000 BC. Probably the same time as complex language and cave painting. It was one of the drivers behind our transition from competitive individual hunters to collaborative members of a social group.
Sharing dreams builds bonds. After telling someone your dream you will feel closer to them. And they will feel closer to you. Trust and intimacy increase, especially if you’re already in a relationship.
We’re rarely alone in our dreams. They’re more social than our waking lives. It makes sense that early humans assumed they were a communal resource.
I was working in Switzerland when I dreamed of the buried man. There, it’s illegal to own a single guinea pig. It would be abusive to deprive a social animal of companionship. That compassion doesn’t extend to our own species. Isolation increases human risk of death by 26%.
When 36% of us are lonely, it’s time to recognize we’ve gone astray. Like our ancestors thousands of years ago, we need some help finding our tribe.
And just as they were before, our dreams are calling us home.
“Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune” — Carl Jung
How did we wander so far from the campfire? Why did we stop sharing dreams? Some people blame advances in science.
Neuroscientists have had a theory since the 1970s. They call it Activation-Synthesis. More recently it’s been updated to the Activation-Information-Mode theory. But the general gist remains.
Neuroscientists say that when you’re asleep your brain organizes all the new information from the previous day. So its ready to start fresh the next morning. Neurons in the areas of your brain that control memory and emotion go into overdrive. This helps with the deep-clean.
The logical frontal cortex sees the activity. It tries to make sense of the chaos. It overlays a story. This is your dream. Neatly self-contained by an individual brain. Fully yours.
In the 1990s functional magnetic resonance imaging was invented. The new technology let Neuroscientists see what was going on inside a person’s head. It caused an explosion of research into the Activation-Synthesis theory.
At the same time, in New York, Montague Ullman was studying dreams in a very different way. He had spent decades developing a group-approach to dream analysis. One that didn’t rely on the expertise of a doctor. One that empowered ordinary people to gather and heal. By 1996 the psychiatrist was ready to publish his wisdom in Appreciating Dreams.
For Ullman, dreams didn’t belong to a single person. They didn’t come from chaos in an isolated brain. Dreams are our shared consciousness. They urge us on to recovery and reconnection. With ourselves, and with each other.
They’re not noise, they’re a kind of truth. A kind of love.
“There is a socially unmet need to come together in a safe environment to explore through dreams deeper aspects of their being, to make discoveries that help them to unload secrets that interfere with their connectedness with other people. I think everyone needs that.” — Montague Ullman
For more than forty-two millennia dreams have existed quietly beside us. Evolving in tandem with humanity. In the corner of our eye. Often ignored but always patient.
It’s time we recognized their value. Let’s meet in the dawn glow to try Ullman’s medicine. It's going to taste sweeter than you think.
“Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone” — Allan Watts
