Visions

I dream more under certain conditions. When I travel, when I sleep in, when it’s warm, my dreams seem to become more monumental. This morning, in the warmth of a lie-in in an unfamiliar room, I dreamt of being in an enormous theatre, which projected a movie onto a screen far above the reclining seats. The ceiling was several stories away, and yet the image projected was so tall and wide that even flat on my back I could see neither the bottom nor the top of it.

The image was of a mountain, cloaked in mist. The only other thing that I knew in the dream was that the film about to be shown was related to one of two important research projects that I was working on.

In waking life I’m not doing any research. If dreams are a side effect of integrating new memories and experiences, making new neural connections, then it makes sense why travel would stimulate more of them. And something about the lightness of late-morning sleep seems to reveal them, to bring them closer to the surface.

But I’m not sure why the temperature would matter. Maybe I’ll sleep in at different temperatures, to see if affects the vividness of my dreams.

I'm Bryan Kam. I'm thinking about complexity and selfhood. Please sign up to my newsletter, follow me on Mastodon, or see more here.