Sleeping Under The Rainbow
I slept under a giant rainbow when I was young. Each color spanned a width of the wall as long as my arm, soaring from one corner of the bedroom to another. My head touched purple each night, as I nestled up as close to the wall as I could.
The paint matched a quilt my mother made. Wrapped in a cocoon of imagination and love each night, I fell asleep already knowing what my dreams would be.
Since I was a little girl, I could control my dreams. It wasn’t until high school that I learned the term “lucid dreaming,” and that people work for years to try to achieve it. To me, controlling my dreams was second nature — I thought something happy before I went to bed, and when I hit the REM stage, I floated down, untethered to reality, manipulating my subconscious to create stories I starred in.
I dreamt the boy named Zach I’d had a crush on for years finally asked me out. I dreamt I was a dancer on stage performing with Britney Spears. A regular favorite foreshadowed what my life ended up becoming: I regularly dreamt about being a journalist, albeit one on television.
Because I grew up with thoughts that turned into action-packed adventures when I closed my eyes each night, if I didn’t plan to dream about anything, dreams became a way for my mind to show me things when I was sleeping that I refused to think about while awake.
I started to occasionally record the dreams I couldn’t control, struggling to find meaning in abstract thoughts with only obscure references to things that happened that day.
One recent, recurring nightmare takes place in post-apocalyptic San Francisco. I’m alone on the roof of a crumbling building, fighting off an unknown villain, when I hear puppies whining, licking a mother who fell victim to whatever it is I am fighting against. Each time I reach out to pick a forlorn-looking puppy, I wake up.
I have this dream whenever I go to bed stressed, thinking about people or things I am supposed to be taking care of. My dreams, and frequently nightmares, remain a barometer of my mental and physical wellness.
Dream interpretation is constantly evolving, and for millennia, humans have tried to understand them. In the second century, ancient Greek diviner Artemidorus wrote Oneirocritica, five volumes of dream study, that include theories like symbols in dreams are a result of the day spent awake, and that dreams could possibly reveal the future. Even psychics today sometimes ask you to describe dreams you’ve had recently, either to pull personal information to use in a reading, or, for those who believe in them, to figure out what the subconscious or dead relatives are trying to say.
Science still doesn’t have answers for what dreams mean, though there is plenty of psychological research that tries to answer these questions. According to psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, dreams are the “royal road to the unconscious.” And the continuity hypothesis is the idea that what we dream about is continuous with the events, interactions and feelings that happen during the day. Then there is the activation-synthesis hypothesis that states dreams mean basically nothing, while the threat simulation theory is the understanding that dreams are a biological defense mechanism that actually help humans evolve.
Regardless of why or what we dream about, that time spent in dreamland is scientifically proven to benefit our mental health and healing. A 2011 study by Matthew Walker, psychology professor and investigator at the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory at UC Berkeley, discovered that dreaming can help people overcome painful memories.
“The dream stage of sleep, based on its unique neurochemical composition, provides us with a form of overnight therapy, a soothing balm that removes the sharp edges from the prior day’s emotional experiences,” he said in the study.
It’s not based in science, but my theory is somewhat proven by nights upon nights of tumultuous sleep: Bad dreams mean something isn’t quite right in my life. Whether it’s stress from work, friends, relationships or the flu, I know that when my mind fills my dreams with negative energy, it’s because I’ve brought that energy into bed with me.
Frequently I first realize something is wrong when I’m asleep. My awake self might take a while to understand what it is.
It was a dream I had back home in my mother’s house, in the room next to the one with the rainbow now hidden beneath layers of paint, that set me off on my current adventure. My dream self was in my apartment in San Francisco, wandering through endless hallways with doors that lead nowhere. I couldn’t go anywhere besides my bedroom and the hallway, and I desperately wanted to get out. My legs weighed a thousand pounds, and no matter how much I ached and reached for the door leading outside, I could never touch it.
The next morning, I booked a trip to Europe. “You need to get away,” my dream self told me through the anxiety and terror generated by being unable to escape.
It’s much harder as an adult to control what it is I want to dream about — I no longer slip into it naturally. I’m not sure whether that’s because when I stop actively exercising my imagination each night it becomes brittle, tougher to mold into anything I want.
But when I spend a few minutes before bedtime thinking about what I want my brain to create for me instead of falling asleep to Netflix or a fiction novel, I can feel the malleable thoughts coalesce into something worth closing my eyes for. And if not, I’m at least guaranteed to learn something.
