Dreaming is the Best Way to Start Your New Year -
Here’s Five Reasons Why
Getting a dream journal, and recording your dreams every night, is one of the most important things you can ever do for yourself. The relationship you begin to build with your dreams is a relationship with your own inner world. In that playscape you will find the things that block you, and the potentials you can activate, to consciously create the life you want to live.
The reasons for doing this are many. Here are five to inspire you to put dreaming at the top of your New Year’s resolutions.
Develop Your Creativity
Dreaming, from a neurologic point of view, operates mainly within the brain’s default network. This same network is responsible for much of the creative process. Many neuroscientists refer to dreaming as an intensely creative state.
Both dreaming and creativity operate by synthesizing existing material — memories, sense-impressions, emotions and feelings — along with novel incoming material in order to catapult to something wholly new. The ace-card that dreaming holds is that these new images, ideas, feelings, and inner-understandings are allowed to play out in dream unrestricted. This freedom of thought is present because the parts of the brain that we use in waking time to criticize, judge, limit, and reject new ideas (the executive network) is literally taken off-line during sleep.
Even if you don’t know the meaning of the images and experiences of your dreams, the strangeness of them inspires reflection, which in turn stimulates our creative process. Ideas beget ideas, developing your capacity for the creative strengths of fluency and elaboration. Think of dreaming as gym for the default network and your creative brain. No membership required.
Build Resilience
It’s 2025… yeah, already! We know the calendar is changing, and yet, somehow, we feel like it snuck up on us. That’s the funny thing about us humans — we get that change is happening all the time, but we are always, nonetheless, caught off guard by it. And definitely made uncomfortable by it. Even little changes like the temporary closure of our favorite coffee shop can throw us off kilter.
One day it’s this, the next day it’s that …. Learning to navigate shifting frames of reference, and to accommodate new and different scenarios, sets us up to be at ease when change comes our way. And this is where dreaming comes in.
Every dream is a new world. We get to enter this new world every single night. One night we work our way through a dense forest, the next night we move through a rocky landscape or a futuristic city. No questions asked. We just jump right in and fully engage in each new scenario. We interact with the objects and characters, often unfamiliar in waking life, and think-through, and take, decisions based on the logic of the scenario we find ourselves in.
We go from this completely immersive experience of dream to the completely different, and equally immersive, experience of being awake and living our waking life. Dream + waking = 2 completely different scenarios. Then we go back to sleep. Over and over, through sleep and waking, we are training ourselves to become resilient, to be at ease and even adventurous with shifting frames of reference.
Next time you wake up, pay attention to what you just dreamed, and how easily you just shifted into the waking world. You’re already more resilient than you thought.
Untangle Your Emotions
Life is fast and composed of numerous encounters. Just as we realize we forgot to wish our mother a happy birthday we’re pinged by our boss that a project deadline has been moved up; before we can digest this, Carl down the hall comes rushing in with some drama about why that deadline won’t be met. Now it’s a five-alarm fire, and there’s no time to think about how we feel, we just have to act.
How creative are we in the middle of a five-alarm fire? Obviously, not much.
Freeze-frame it. What I’ve just described is like the classic moment in an old film where the lady is tied up on the train tracks, with the train barreling toward her at full speed. Our inner, creative self is on the track; our emotions are the speeding train. If we don’t see it coming it’s an inevitable collision. If we do, however, suddenly we’re that quiet guy who appears on the side of the tracks who throws the switch, sending the train shooting off on a different track and saving the lady. That quiet guy is found in our dreaming.
Dreams put us right in front of our emotions. We feel them, we experience them viscerally, and the images literally show them to us so we get the full picture. We thrash in the covers and wake up sweating because an erupting volcano is spewing lava everywhere and we were running like crazy to save everyone. Or we’re in a car with no steering wheel, out of control and tearing around dangerous curves.
Getting the full picture of our emotional inner world, and seeing where things are ratcheting up at full volume, gives us the opportunity to bring them down a notch — or three. If we dream a nightmare then we are living a nightmare in waking life. If we wake up, and consciously choose to flip the switch — go for a walk, meditate, breathe slowly — we avoid being run over by the train of our emotions, save the lady, and rescue the project.
Gain New Perspectives
Dreams are a glimpse into the mirror of our inner life. They show us where we are in our present tense state of being - like, content, disgruntled, contracted, or expanded — and where it is possible for us to go. They show us where we are blocked, and they even show us how to get over that block.
Often, the blocks in our dreams are a belief system we are using to hold back some authentic part of ourselves. Perhaps we are telling ourselves that “love isn’t possible”, putting a wall around the part of ourselves that knows how to give and receive love. Perhaps we are telling ourselves that our project will fail, putting our courageous aspect in a prison. Or maybe we’ve bought into the belief that “anger makes me strong”, and dream an over-grown monster truck knocking everyone off the freeway.
In waking life these belief systems make total sense. We view them as “how things are”, without questioning their existence or even supposing that they are blocking the existence of another point of view. Dreams give us multiple perspectives beyond this static, dominant vision, opening the aperture so that we can discover new ways of seeing and new points of view.
New perspectives means new opportunities. Including, possibly, breaking out of a restrictive belief system. Walls can be knocked down to free ourselves to love again, courage can be released, and over-grown monster trucks can be downsized to make room for other energies to come forward.
Discover Yourself
There’s more to life than intense emotions and confining belief systems. Dig through this and one drops below to a quiet place where something more can be discovered — a deeper part of ourselves. The place of meaning and mystery. A place where not only do our more authentic aspects get to make themselves known to us, but where these interact with a much bigger picture of life.
One of the ways dreams open the window to this deeper part of ourselves is by putting us in scenarios where we experience wonder and awe. Dreams like where we find we can fly, or dive deep underwater to encounter brightly colored creatures we never knew existed. Dreams of grand libraries waiting for us to choose a golden book to open, or a quiet mesmerizing temple at the top of mist-shrouded mountain.
These kinds of dream experiences profoundly shift our waking experience — we never see life the same way again. What was maybe once dull or routine starts to shimmer with a newfound vitality. Nothing literal on the outside has changed, but everything is different.
This type of gift belongs uniquely to dreaming because dreaming operates outside of expectation. “I didn’t think it was possible” just means we had a lot of assumptions about what is possible. When we dream, we set aside these bouncers-at-the-door and literally surrender to sleep. That’s when we finally get to discover something wholly new.
New year’s resolutions are ultimately about bringing out a better side of ourself, one we know is there, somewhere. So this year add dreaming to your resolution’s list — it will help you find that better self, and use it to keep all the other resolutions you make.
For more on the default network and dreaming see, for example: Domhoff, G.W. & Fox, K.C.R. (2015) Dreaming and the default network: A review, synthesis, and counterintuitive research proposal. Consciousness and Cognition 33, pgs. 342–353; McNamara, P. (2019) The Neuroscience of Sleep and Dreams. Cambridge University Press.
