FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Breaking S’News

Dreams making headlines … And not

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”

Youth Climate Activist, Greta Thunberg addressing the United Nations Summit, Sept. 21, 2019

by Tzivia Gover, Certified Dreamwork Professional

Imagine a world in which the pundits on the nightly weigh in on big dreams from the day’s headlines. What did the reigning monarch dream last night? What recurring nightmare is plaguing the Prime Minister? Imagine the anchorwoman and talking heads arguing over interpretations of what these dreams might mean for cities and countries around the globe.

Even I, a professional dreamworker and former journalist, admit that’s a far-fetched fantasy. After all, dreams rarely make the news at all, and when they do it’s usually in the context of something that’s been lost—like a species that’s quickly going extinct. For example, sleep scientists speak of dream-loss when they report on the epidemic of insomnia that marks our collective crisis of sleeplessness.

Dreams as aspiration have a better chance of grabbing headlines. The DREAMers hashtag took off when primarily undocumented students fought for their right to a college education and fair treatment. Most recently, climate activist Greta Thunberg spoke up for her generation in a fierce speech at the UN Summit on Sept. 21.  “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” she said. Dreams, used as a rhetorical device, woke us up to collective truths during the Civil Rights movement when Martin Luther King Jr. issued a clarion call for racial equality and justice, that solemnized the words, “I have a dream.”

But the dreams that arise in sleep almost never make headlines, despite the fact that dreams are behind countless events that have shaped our world. Some evolutionary psychologists and philosophers have posited that dreams may have been the secret to survival for our hunter-gatherer ancestors, allowing them to rehearse fight or flight strategies, and dreams may even have been the midwives to the birth of language.

In some indigenous cultures, including the Iroquois of North America and the Senoi of Malaysia, dreams are revered and routinely shared amongst members of the community. In 1876, Sitting Bull was said to have foreseen the events of “Little Big Horn” in a vision or dream, which may have accounted for the Lakota Sioux victory over General Custer and his army.

Night news

Various inventions and innovations that have shaped contemporary life have come to us through dreams, including the electric sewing machine, without which we wouldn’t have had the Industrial Revolution, and various Beatles’ songs including “Yesterday” and “Let it Be,” whose words and melodies helped define a cultural revolution.

Dreams know no political affiliation and they defy national boundaries. They were infamously lurking behind the events of September 11, 2001, as members of al-Qaeda had dreams of flying planes into towers that led up to the attack on the World Trade Center. And the idea for Google, which has changed our world in ways we have yet to fully grasp, came to Larry Page in a dream. But these news-making dreams have largely been ignored, just as most nights, most people seem to blithely ignore theirs.

In the past 200 years, while literacy rates worldwide have risen exponentially, dream literacy seems to have plummeted. Despite a brief burst of popularity thanks to the works of Freud and Jung in the early 20^th century, dreams have taken a beating as literalism and rationalism have gained ascendancy. These days talk of dreams is considered to be crazy, weird, or at best a fringe fascination. Few publicly admit to taking them seriously, and even those who want to understand their dreams may have trouble finding reliable resources to guide them.

Still, these silent newsmakers persist. Even as they are denied airtime in private conversation and in political discourse, dreams will continue to be an underground source of breaking news items. Dreams, after all, are a natural, healthy part of the sleep cycle, and they represent an alternative form of thinking that everyone participates in, whether they prefer Fox News, the BBC or MSNBC.

A better dream

If we were to promote universal dream literacy we would grant wide access to innovation and inspiration born of the neurochemistry of the brain asleep and dreaming. This alternative form of nighttime thinking is by design more fluid, creative, and connected to wisdom and intuition than our daytime mind can muster. Scans of the brain during sleep reveal that it is more active during dreams than waking.  What unique ways of knowing are we closing our eyes to when we dismiss our dreams?

One day perhaps, wisdom from the sleeping mind will break open a brighter consciousness that will help us fulfill our true potential, both individually and collectively. And maybe it will even be broadcast on the nightly news.

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The news of your dreams

As a dreamworker and former journalist, I think about a night of dreaming as a series of reports from the inner realms of my heart and mind. It’s as if there are various beat reporters within me covering the health of my body, the state of my emotions, and issuing bulletins from my soul’s temple.

Sometimes I even give my dreams headlines when I write them in my journal as if they were news reports: “Long Lost Niece Makes Surprise Appearance at Birthday Party” or “Bridge Jumper’s Desperate Plunge Interrupted by Passing Stranger” or “Suburban Housewife Courted by Presidential Hopeful” etc.

Here are some suggestions for how you might look at your dreams with a newscaster’s eye for the world-shaking story, interesting detail, informative source, and quirky character:

·               Featuring Dreams: Write a profile or Q&A-style interview based on a dream character. Your finished product might read like something you’d in your favorite magazine.