If you pay attention to your dreams like I do, you might be curious about them. What are they? Why do we have them? Why are they so hard to remember? Is there really any point in remembering them and working with them to understand more about the psyche? Why do they sometimes seem to want to tell us something? Finally, you might have noticed there are types. There are the dreams that go around in circles, never going anywhere, and others that take you on an increasingly bizarre and epic ride. I decided I would learn why I keep having these two types of dreams. My research led me far into how scientists understand sleep and how that, in turn, teaches us a lot about dreams. Here are the two types of dreams I’m talking about. The Circular Dream The Wild Ride I learned that the two kinds generally occur in different stages of sleep. What do I mean by stages? The Stages of SleepSleep isn’t one uniform state. Through the night, you’ll cycle roughly every ninety minutes through several stages. You dream in all stages, but the most vivid dreams occur in REM state. These are the stages and the dreams that occur in them. Sleep Onset, the Hypnagogic Stage This is the transition from awake to asleep. Your breathing and heart rate slow, your eyes move slowly, and your muscles start to relax. It’s very easy to wake back up and you probably won’t know you’ve just been asleep. This stage usually lasts just a few minutes. The type of dream you could have during sleep onset is called hypnagogic imagery. It’s just a single image or sensation, rather than a scene. You’re falling, or see a face, or hear a word, or have a feeling, but not all four. You may think you just hallucinated or had a vision if you didn’t realize you were asleep. The brain has already begun the work that we experience as dreaming. Light Sleep During light sleep, dreams show more complete scenes than during the hypnogogic period, but have undeveloped narratives. If the scene gets interrupted by a micro-arousal, this interrupts the work of a kind of librarian of the mind who is trying to stack new books and restack the ones that were taken out and consulted during the day. When you go back to sleep, you may resume the scene from the same point, go over it again, and remember the dream across the micro-arousals. It’s as if the librarian has to keep starting again. Deep Sleep If you’re awakened out of deep sleep, you might arise with the vague sense of having been experiencing something, but you don’t know what. It is out of this stage that people may wake themselves up with a night terror. Night terrors are different from nightmares. You wake up terrified, but you don’t know what about. Nightmares, in contrast, have dream content, either the maddeningly repetitive scenes in light sleep, or terrifying stories in REM sleep. Night terrors have only the sense of panic. Rapid Eye Movement Sleep (REM) The librarian of your mind does not use the Dewey Decimal System, as in a real library, classifying memories by topic. She utilizes a memory recommendation algorithm. It’s like she goes through the whole book and hyperlinks every word to every other instance of that word in the whole library. The links would be weighted differently, so that the associations you usually make will be the ones that come up first. The long, bizarre, plot-twisting dream is a signature of REM sleep, especially the longer REM periods that show up later in an undisturbed night. Two things about REM physiology explain its character. During REM, activity drops in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for logical consistency, working memory, and reality-testing, while the visual-association region and the amygdala, responsible for emotions, stay active. That’s why REM dreams can shift settings, violate physics, and swap characters without you questioning any of it at the moment. Ideas also connect more freely. REM cognition looks more like hyperassociation than waking thought, linking distant or unrelated concepts more readily. And there’s simply more time to develop a dream; a long, uninterrupted REM period gives a story room to develop, instead of having a fragment before an arousal cuts it off. The Overall Architecture of Sleep We used to think dreaming only occurred in REM sleep but, in a 2025 study, they woke up 505 people in sleep labs 2,600 times and confirmed dreams can be present in any stage of sleep. They reported dreams in about 85 percent of REM awakenings and roughly 40 to 60 percent the rest of the night. Similarly, we used to think we only had several dreams a night, each only lasting a few minutes. Now we have reason to believe there’s an unbroken stream of activity running under the surface, night and day, that we mostly fail to retrieve. The librarian works around the clock, filing impressions, creating hyperlinks, and pulling files in and out of the stacks. However, during the night, she works through the backlog that piles up when she is interrupted during the day. The Librarian’s Day Shift Most of a dream’s content seems to draw from thoughts, feelings and events during the previous day. The second most common source is the thoughts, feelings and events of a week ago. It’s as if the librarian is taking a second pass at integrating the material after more data comes in. People rarely dream about what they read or numbers they’ve been calculating. REM quiets the brain’s language-processing and structured, rule-based circuitry, so she has no way to stage anything that depends on grammar or symbolic rules, however important it was during the day. I thought you might appreciate an example, right about now. ExampleWhat Happened During the Day Your boss yelled at you in a meeting for someone else’s mistake. There were lots of ways you could have responded; but you couldn’t punch him out and didn’t want to be a dick and point your finger at the one responsible, so you sat there and took it. However, you did stew about it all day, coming up with things you could have done or said in the moment, but didn’t think of it or chose not to. You might continue to stew for a while, replaying the meeting and drafting comebacks until you notice your boss is renting too much space in your head. Here’s what’s happening while you do that: the librarian can’t file the book while you’re still reading it and she needs to file the book before you can put the incident in perspective, make all the connections, and see the big picture. That’s why it’s better to sleep on it. Sleep Onset Light Sleep Deep Sleep In deep sleep, the librarian is trimming off the parts of the day’s memories you don’t need to keep. As far as she’s concerned, you only have to keep some residue of the day’s events that you’re going to need again, but everything else just clutters things up. She only has so much room in her library. Therefore, the squeaky chair, the cold coffee, or the praise you got a moment before, all go to the scrap heap. At the same time, your body is repairing its cells from the cortisol stress the event put on your body. It’s patching you up, getting ready to go again, the next day. REM Sleep Given that we are dreaming or something like it, continuously, day and night. Why do we remember some, but not others? Remembering DreamsYour body rests and files daily events while you sleep without you needing to be awake. Most of the time, this happens completely without your conscious mind. A dream happens when you become conscious while you are still asleep. The Journalist of the Brain What changes from stage to stage is how much activity there is to narrate, and how tightly it’s held to anything sensible. In light sleep, the librarian keeps getting interrupted, so the journalist tells a story that doesn’t go anywhere. In deep sleep, there’s practically no news for the journalist to report on, just the general zeitgeist of the inside of the brain. In REM, things come alive because the librarian can finally put away the new memories that have been generated, as well as the unchosen options it brought out of the stacks. At the same time, in REM, the part of the cortex that would normally check a story against reality goes quiet. That would be the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which we met before. It’s like the journalist’s editor, gone home for the night. Without the editor around to police what the journalist says, he goes rogue, filing stories that defy the establishment. Here I’m talking about your establishment, your identity; the account of who you are that decided you were the kind of person who takes it on the chin rather than telling his boss to shove it because they didn’t fit the story you’re used to telling about yourself. The editor is interested in maintaining a steady identity, so you have some continuity from day to day and others can trust you. When the Editor is Asleep But remember, the journalist has a handicap when you are asleep and the brain’s language-processing and structured, rule-based circuitry is shut down. Take that away and a propositional statement like “I am angry because my boss blamed me unfairly” is no longer available. He still must tell stories, so he tells them with only the material he has available: images and associations weighted by emotional charge rather than by logical relevance. It’s as if the journalist becomes a poet when you’re asleep. Both dreams and poetry communicate through feelings, memories, and symbols rather than literally and logically. The editor doesn’t value poetry. So, when he wakes up, when you do, he refuses to run it because it makes no sense to him. As far as the editor is concerned, a dream does not need to be remembered for the activities of the librarian to function well. If that’s the case, then what’s the point of trying to remember my dreams at all? Do I really need to be running for my notepad when I wake up, trying to beat the editor’s wastepaper basket? Why do I want my clients to remember them and tell them to me, just as they tell me the week’s actual events? It’s because those books that got pulled out and put away, unread, contain things that you need to know. Why Do We Work with Dreams?Nothing in the science suggests that catching a dream before it fades preserves consolidation work that would otherwise be lost. The librarian’s filing, linking, and deleting happens regardless of whether you get the memo afterward. However, there’s a lot of research that shows that working with dreams will increase your self-awareness and self-understanding, and, when you tell your dreams to a therapist who knows how to work with them, it’ll deepen your engagement in therapy. The value of a dream is that, once recalled, it becomes new raw material for a completely different kind of thinking: deliberate, conscious, associative reflection while awake, with your reasoning and self-monitoring fully intact. If you pay attention to your dreams, then all the parts of you are represented, including the parts your establishment wishes would go away. If you don’t pay attention to them, your options are narrower and they find some other way to get their points across. If you wake up in the morning and remember that dream about your brother having cancer and you volunteering to take it from him, you might be puzzled about what it all means. It was the work of your brain’s journalist, moonlighting as a poet. However, what you got is something hard to understand. You practically have to reenter a dream state to unlock its meaning. How to Understand What a Dream is Trying to SayEngage your default mode network by meditating, reflecting, brain storming, free associating, or active imagination, and you should be able to retrace your steps back from the dream of cancer the illness, to cancer the zodiac sign, symbolized by the crab, and on to your boss, the crab. Then you can trace your boss who yelled at you to your Dad who yelled at you and your brother in the dream to the brother you took the heat for. What you will find is that many of the feelings you thought you caught in the meeting from your boss were actually left over feelings about your Dad and your decision to cover for your colleague was based on what happened when you covered for your brother. You’d be able to sort things out deliberately and react differently to different situations once you perceive their differences. If that’s all you do with the dream, then you will have a more full understanding of the relationship between your boss yelling at you and your personal history. But, depending on how you feel about dreams challenging your establishment, you could take it another step further and listen to what they are saying. How would I interpret the two dreams you had after your boss yelled at you? Nailed to the Conference Table This is a light-sleep dream, going in circles. You can’t track the associations outward, but you can see it’s circling an image of a foreign looking man being nailed to a conference table and track down the associations you make from that. Now go back in the stacks with your librarian and see what you associate with that image. When I do it, I come up with the crucifixion of Jesus. You might stop there and say, that’s the way it was, my boss nailed me, publicly, for someone else’s failure. But that’s not what the dream is saying. A foreign looking man is getting crucified. Not you. Or is it? Remember all those things you could have done, but didn’t. You didn’t because telling your boss to shove it or tattling on a co-worker is all foreign to you. That’s the part getting crucified. You were the one doing the nailing, in fact. Staying silent instead of doing something you thought was stupid. This is how a dream can compensate for what you did during the day. It’s showing you that absorbing it silently was not easy. You had to hold the other three options down all day. The dream is less a verdict on what you did and more a readout of what it cost you to do it, isolated from the social reasoning (”didn’t want to be a dick”) that made it look easy in daylight. It’s worth asking in the morning, was it easy? Or did some part of you already know, by the time you were driving home, that it wasn’t? Volunteering to take your brother’s cancerThis is the REM dream, so follow the chain of associations outward and see where it actually goes. Boss → crab → cancer the sign → cancer the illness → brother. That’s the path of associations. But notice what’s at the end of the path, it doesn’t just land you in a scene about cancer. It has you volunteer for it. You didn’t choose self-sacrifice in the meeting after carefully considering all your options, it was automatic, you did what you were supposed to do. The dream compensates by pushing it all the way to the end. Taking on your brother’s cancer is impossible. Nobody can absorb someone else’s illness by volunteering for it. You can’t solve every problem with self-sacrifice, so reconsider having that as a default setting, now that you can see clearer the next day. Why are Dreams Numinous?I hope you can forgive me for turning some things that science describes as cold mechanisms into personalities with intentions. The default mode network is not actually a librarian. Nor is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex an editor. Nor is the posterior cortex a journalist; nor is it a poet. But if I hadn’t tried to breathe life into neurological abstractions, then I bet you wouldn’t have read this far. But why does the posterior cortex (the journalist) do it? Why does it sometimes make objects feel alive, and build characters demanding something of you? In other words, why do many dreams seem numinous? They can seem numinous numinous because the source of much of the journalist’s stories is a screaming hysteric, the amygdala. The amygdala didn’t evolve to catalog facts, it evolved to answer one question as fast as possible: does this thing want to eat me? A sound outside the cave isn’t processed as “80% chance of wind, 20% chance of bear coming into the cave”, it’s processed as the bear so you have time to grab a sharp stick while the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (editor) weighs in. Like any journalist, the posterior cortex quotes the amygdala to hype the story to get your attention. But, if the question is, why do dreams feel like anything at all? Then, we don’t know because that question brings us to the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Science has no final answer for why a bunch of electrically charged cells have consciousness, much less why we are conscious of feelings in dreams. Dreams don’t add a new mystery; they just make a ubiquitous mystery more vivid and personal, because the dreaming brain is producing a fully immersive experience with almost none of the real stuff that waking life uses to keep it in the background. Ordinarily there’s a world that explains your experience, so the fact that it’s experienced at all slides by unnoticed. Dreams are what’s left when you take the world away and the feeling is still there. ReferencesOn what dreams are, mechanically
On sleep stages and dream content
On why some dreams get remembered and others don’t
On the associative “engine” behind dreams
On why some daytime content (reading, numbers) rarely appears in dreams
On the dream-lag effect
On dream work and therapy
On the history of dream interpretation
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