Recently, I wrote an article with a tip for remembering more dreams: consume less external content. The basic reason for this is that the more you’re engaged in perceiving external content, especially content that requires a lot of sensory processing and attention, the more exhausted your brain gets. You experience cognitive overload and have a hard time remembering anything, let alone your nightly dreams. High stimulating content with fast-moving images and sounds (ie. TikTok, Reels, and video games) also impact your ability to go to sleep, stay asleep, and receive images in hypnogagic states or dreams.
Today, I want to discuss how what we watch and listen to on our devices can directly affect the quality and content of our dreams in a way that keeps us from accessing our own internal images, which in turn separates us from receiving potential emotional insights, creative inspiration, a sense of renewal, and spontaneous healing we may otherwise receive from the encounters and events in our dreams. On top of that, if you are someone who would like to be open to receiving nonlocal data (ie. precognitive images, intuitive hits), getting into a restful state and clear mind is a lot more difficult when you spend a lot of your waking hours engaging with over-stimulating videos, shows and other media.
Again, it’s pretty simple, even if it’s not always easy. I know many of us rely on our devices for so much — entertainment, information, communication and even bonding with friends and family through sharing images, videos, podcasts or playing video games in communal online spaces. So I am not suggesting you should completely isolate yourself or check out from society by not consuming any news or social media. That said, doing a complete detox of all the above for a week or two wouldn’t hurt anyone, and could offer you a lot of information about how your own nervous system responds to various types of content.
Most of us have become quite numb, and even permissive, to the effects on our nervous system in response to various types of content we consume. Jump scares, bracing, holding our breath as we watch a scary show on Netflix. Oxytocin (the “bonding chemical”) releasing as we watch a heartwarming reunion of a soldier and his pregnant wife after months apart. And by now, most of us are aware of the dopamine hits we get just from scrolling, seeing new and novel images, one after the other after the other.
Even though we don’t know for certain all the reasons why we dream, we do know that processing the images and experiences from the day is one likely reason. Even mystical traditions suggest that there are different types of dreams, but one type of dream is the brain’s way of consolidating memories and deconstructing the emotions and the events of the day before. That includes memories and emotions of watching social media, news, TV, and video games. So basically your brain at night needs to do the work of not just processing your social interactions and the successes and failures at work or school, but all the interactions you took in during the day, including the emotional or physiological reactions you had to watching strangers on the internet fight, flirt, or escape capture from a serial killer.
If you are an active dreamer, you may have already noticed that people you don’t know make their way into your dreams, including celebrities and fictional characters. (You can read an article on that topic here.) This is because we do form some kind of relationship or bond with these characters when we engage in the content that features or focuses on them. We get attached to them.
This isn’t necessarily a terrible thing. If you came to me in a dreamwork session with a dream about a fictional character or a celebrity, we would work it the same we would any dream. There is something to learn about oneself even from interactions in dreams with celebrities. However, if all your dreams take place in Fortnite worlds or backrooms, I would want to explore that with you as there is something artificial about those types of worlds that distances us from our own sensory experiences and emotions. It’s not an indicator that anything is wrong with you, but as you are a human being that presumably does need to go out into the natural world and interact with it, dreams that take place in natural settings can offer us insights into our own complex feelings, needs, and reactions to being with people. Dreaming constantly of “fantasy” worlds or video game universes keeps us from confronting all sorts of feelings: loneliness, grief, fear, and even joy and pleasure. It keeps us from knowing ourselves.
When you cut back on external images, your own internal images often start populating your dreams again. This may be hard for some of us, actually. One reason why we engage so much with external content is to distract ourselves from feeling our own lives; our own discontent, our own boredom, our own longing, our own despair. However, if you are someone who feels lost, confused, or has a particular type of yearning for what life or relationships could be, this is often a first step toward transforming what is into what could be. You need to first feel the pain of what’s missing to be able to know it enough to long for it. You need to experience the awkwardness of encounters with others first in order to learn how to tolerate them enough for those encounters to grow and expand into real connections. Dreaming of awkward social encounters and practicing tolerating them in a safe container with a dreamwork practitioner is actually one way of getting better at it.
But first you need to let those types of dreams back in.
The same goes for other kinds of interactions. If you find yourself frustrated at work, bored at home, confused by dating, or just generally discontent with your life, you might be someone who spends a lot of time using external content for emotional relief or comfort even. It is not uncommon. I am not judging you. What I want you to know today is that at some point if you choose to cut back, you may dream more and your own dream images will return; images that come from deep inside you with a purpose. I believe those images are arising for you in your sleep to help you know yourself better. They know all about your boredom, your despair, and your longing. They want something to change, too, but first you have to be willing to be with your own images and feelings, to re-possess your imagination.
External images like social media, television, and video games can completely take over our imagination. Someone else’s images are being fed into us when we watch excessive media. And, frankly, most of those images are created and curated to keep us coming back to watch more, which can have much greater consequences than simply separating us from our own dream images.
Cutting back on external content, and adding in experiences in natural settings can shift the content of your dreams, even if only temporarily. In addition to allowing you to get to know yourself better, dreams that contain your own internal images can train you to become better at trusting your own intuition, accessing your own creativity, and even sometimes perceiving data from the past or the future that could be useful to you in your waking life now. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a permanent lifestyle change, but just like cutting out sugar or caffeine can help you tell how little or much they impact your health and well-being, so can cutting back on media for a period.
