Hi, it's Andy here and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Tuesday morning.
I hope you slept well last night, I wonder if you remember the dreams that you had last
night.
Some people seem to remember a lot of their dreams for other people, it's more of a struggle.
Some people say they don't dream at all.
It's most scientists will tell us sleep specialists or tell us that all of us dream
actually, it's just that sometimes we remember, sometimes we don't.
Sometimes we might even be aware of dreaming throughout the night.
Now, dreaming's through the lens of mindfulness, dreaming's a really interesting topic.
The challenge and the caveat I'll say up front is that the risk, the danger is that we get
so sort of obsessed with our dreams, that we start spending most of our waking hours
then thinking about our sleeping hours.
We don't really want to get into that, but I think it can be helpful to have just a
sort of a general sense of what's happening.
And it's interesting, a lot of people will even compare their meditation to dream night
sort of state.
In so much as when we removed the filter of the rational mind, the thoughts that appear
in the mind are quite bizarre sometimes, they're quite strange almost as though they sometimes
appear in our dreams when we're sleeping.
The way it was explained to me and I'll give you a little bit of sort of context for this.
So I can remember one night, I woke up in the morning and I remembered this dream that
I was swimming around in this swimming pool that was filled with black current juice.
And I didn't really know what to make of it.
Maybe there was nothing to make of it.
It was just a strange dream.
But then when I traced it back, the previous day I'd been standing in an old shed and there
was an old cart and a black current juice on the shelf by the side.
And at the same time I was having a conversation with someone about swimming.
So that's an example of sort of how our environment and what happens to us during the day can
feed in and become part of that sort of landscape part of that story, that narrative that might
then influence our dreams.
And that's happening all day long, of course.
But then there's sort of several other parts of the sleep cycle.
And I'm not talking here about REM sleep or deep sleep, any scientific cycle.
This is more sort of how the mind expresses itself through the night.
So we have that environmental input.
Then there's a sort of superficial, if you like, by superficial I don't mean not important.
I mean the everyday sort of activity.
So if you find yourself waking up, let's say a little more sort of in the early hours,
you may well find that your mind is predisposed to thinking, planning, kind of what's going
on, there might be something particular happening in your life at the moment that you're thinking,
you're processing even as you sleep.
So we go from the environmental sort of thing, moring to things that might be on our mind
a little bit.
And then as we go into the later hours, so these are the sort of the few hours before we
wake up in the morning, purely from a meditation point of view.
These are the dreams that might be accessing a sort of a deeper state of consciousness,
sort of thoughts, feelings, ideas that we don't necessarily have access to in our waking
hours.
And they can sometimes appear as conversations, sometimes they appear as images, sometimes
they can be quite helpful.
They might even be nudging us in a particular direction, giving us a little bit of guidance.
It's not that we should put too much emphasis on them, but it's helpful to have an understanding
of how and why these dreams unfold the way they do.
And even from a science point of view, because science doesn't yet understand consciousness,
it can't yet fully understand the landscape of dreaming.
We have some ideas, but we're still sort of trying to work that out from a scientific
point of view.
But as I look back over over the years, we did a lot of training around awareness and
sleep to the extent that every night we would lie down and we put in the intention we
plant the seed to be aware of our dreams throughout the night.
And over time it's surprising, you can actually become more aware of the dream state even
whilst you're dreaming.
But at the very least in the morning you will be more aware of the dreams that you had
and better able to understand where they fit into the mind.
Have a great night sleep tonight.
Thanks for listening today.
I look forward to seeing you back here tomorrow.
