I'm in a couple of writing groups. It's a way to meet other writers, share our work, get feedback, and commune about the passion and impulse to put our stories on a page. This is where I met Jim Latham during a Zoom group session. He's an Alaskan writer who specializes in Micro, Flash, and Short Fiction. I became a fan of his work immediately. Jim's writing was my first real foray into the short fictional forms.
My inbox dinged with a new weekly story from Jim Latham. Only this week, it was a dream story. I asked him if I could share it here with you. It goes like this:
My dreams have changed. I don't know why.
They're harking back to my childhood—to the bad-old school days—dredging up long-nurtured hurts and mashing them up with more recent pain.
What's weird is the mood. These dreams feel good—like my psyche is tearing crusted-over scabs from the edges of old wounds and then sewing the freshly debrided tissue together. Closing holes to create a whole.
I'm afraid to write this, but I think I'm growing up. Plenty of folks will agree with me when I say it's about damn time.
Or…Maybe it's a phase.
The line that got me, the concept that sent me diving headfirst into researching, was this: dredging up long-nurtured hurts and mashing them up with more recent pain.
That's it, right? That's the magic of dreams. Matthew Walker in Greater Good Science Magazine has a great article breaking down how and why the brain does this "mashing up" of events and timelines.
We dream during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. You won't know it because your brain puts your body on "Force Quit" so it can use all its energy to make sense of the crazy, difficult, hilarious, emotional, random weird things you experience every waking moment, every year of your life. The amount of stimulus and information our brains process in a day, if measured, would meltdown a laptop before the week was out - 34 Gigabytes.
Wow.
During REM, the molecule that triggers anxiety, noradrenaline, is absent from the brain. This allows the memory, and emotional parts of the brain, to fire up as we dream and process things that might otherwise be upsetting in a calm, safe way.
Scientists are studying - and proving - that dream sleep heals us. The function of dreams in humans is literally - overnight therapy.
Jim Latham's dream describes this process vividly. His brain can take past and present hurts and process them in one dream without further traumatizing him. How cool is that? Can you imagine the hot mess we would all be without REM sleep?
I shudder to think of a world without dreams.
But this is the tricky part. There are different kinds of dreams, in my opinion. Some are prophetic rather than therapeutic. Some, I believe, possibly come as messages from our higher angels or otherworldly energies. Some dreams can show up in the form of attacks meant to do psychological harm by someone or something else with intent. But those are the outliers. If there were a way to quantify and categorize dreams happening in real-time, I'm guessing we would find dreams are therapy most of the time. It's the only way we can deal with being human on this planet earth.
When I emailed Jim about sharing his dream story with you, he emailed me back and added this:
The funny thing is I don't often remember my dreams. Usually, I remember a mood, and that's about it. Last night (well, today, when I was asleep), I had a dream I was poaching salmon (!) with a friend from high school I haven't seen in twenty years. We got all set up (dipnet, of course), and a giant freshwater seal chased us away. Not sure what to make of all that.
Jim, this week, is working night shifts on the North Slope in Alaska (He sleeps during the day, does that make him a daydreamer?). I don't have any authority to interpret anyone else's dreams, but I got a strong feeling with this dream that Jim would rather be fishing than working nights on an oil rig. He's Jonesing to go fishing, and his spirit would rather poach fish than wait around for a better time to sit with his net in the water. The Seal? Well, that guy is just making sure Jim doesn't catch all the fish :)
Indeed, Overnight Therapy. Or, in Jim's case, Over-day Therapy.