We have all been there—jolted awake by a nightmare of being exposed, trapped, or chased. During the COVID-19 pandemic, these nocturnal disturbances spiked globally. People dreamed of tidal waves, crumbling cities, and faceless threats. Similar upticks in disturbing dreams were reported in other turbulent times, such as wars, natural disasters, and personal crises. For trauma survivors, these visions often spill into waking life as flashbacks, blurring the line between sleep and waking reality. What if these unsettling mental imageries aren’t glitches in our mental software? What if they’re urgent messages from a built-in navigation system designed to guide us through life?
As a dream practitioner and researcher, I’ve decoded thousands of dreams. What I have learned is this: Your mind is always problem-solving, even in sleep. Contrary to conventional belief, dreams operate with precision, functioning as our inner GPS—constantly identifying, assessing, and recalculating to help us navigate life’s challenges. If we dare to listen, they can help us resolve everything from personal trauma to global crises.
Why We Dream: Your Mind’s Hidden GPS
Dreams are not random. They are the brain’s way of consolidating memories, processing emotions, and solving problems. Your brain is a problem-solving machine, and dreaming is its creative mode of working through issues—not with logic and spreadsheets, but through symbols and metaphors. Consider these examples:
- Elias Howe, the inventor of the modern sewing machine, struggled for years with the needle design until a nightmare of being captured by cannibals wielding spears with holes at their tips revealed the needle’s design.
- Paul McCartney from the Beatles woke with the melody for Yesterday fully formed in his mind.
- Jack Nicklaus, the legendary pro golfer from the ‘70s, broke a career slump after dreaming of a new grip technique.
Even René Descartes, the father of rationalism, credited three vivid dreams with inspiring his philosophical revolution. These examples aren’t quirky accidents. They are proof of a universal human superpower that exists within us.
The Science: During REM sleep, your brain replays the day’s events, cross-references memories, and simulates solutions to unresolved problems. It’s a nightly therapy session and innovation lab rolled into one. Studies show we dream 4-6 times per night, yet most people dismiss dreams as “weird” and forget them entirely.
The War on Dreams: How Western Culture Shut Off Our Inner GPS
As modern humans, we’ve been taught as children and conditioned as adults to dismiss dreams so we can focus on the task at hand. Our society’s current neglect of dreams stems from a confluence of cultural, technological, and psychological factors; in an age dominated by productivity and digital saturation, dreams—subjective, ephemeral, and intangible—struggle to compete with the immediacy of waking life. The prioritization of efficiency marginalizes introspection, relegating dreams to irrelevance.
Scientifically, the reductionist view of dreams as mere neural “noise” during sleep has discouraged exploration of their psychological or spiritual value, reinforcing the notion that they lack practical utility. Modern psychiatry pathologizes waking dreams, viewing immersive daydreaming as “maladaptive” and visions as potential psychosis. Recurring nightmares are treated as sleep disorders to medicate away, while antidepressants like SSRIs suppress REM cycles—muting our most creative state. This biomedical bias ignored centuries of cross-cultural evidence that dreams—whether occurring in sleep or wakefulness—serve vital psychological and creative functions.
Technology further distracts from inner experiences. Constant connectivity demands attention to external stimuli, leaving little mental space for reflecting on dreams. Sleep itself is often compromised by screen time and stress, impairing dream recall. Culturally, dreams are seldom validated outside niche therapeutic or spiritual contexts, perpetuating a stigma around dream sharing as frivolous or self-indulgent.
Schools rarely teach dream literacy, leaving people unequipped to decode their dream insights. Ultimately, dreams clash with modernity’s emphasis on quantifiable outcomes, rendering them casualties of a culture that equates productivity with worth. Reclaiming their significance requires challenging these social norms to recognize dreams as vital tools for self-awareness, problem-solving, and personal growth.
Western Suppression of Waking Dreams: How Stigma Obstructs Healing and Innovation
When Western science defines dreaming as purely a sleep-based phenomenon and reduces it to mere neural activity during sleep, it overlooks a profound truth: your dreaming mind’s creative problem-solving capacity doesn’t shut off when you open your eyes.
Renowned scientists like Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla credited their revolutionary ideas to waking dreams—dream-like mental episodes experienced when awake, encompassing visions and hallucinations. Your brain creates waking dreams not to spook or confuse you but to guide you through understanding the personal and professional challenges you face and toward resolving them.
Imagine a world where Nikola Tesla’s flash of genius was labelled “madness,” where Indigenous elders prescribing plant medicines from sacred dreams were labelled superstitions, and where your most creative insights—born from daydreams—were pathologized as “maladaptive.” This is not dystopian fiction; it is the reality Western medicine has built.
For centuries, colonial systems have weaponized psychiatry to suppress non-ordinary states of consciousness, treating immersive waking dreams as potential psychosis. This is no accident: it reflects a deliberate erasure of Indigenous wisdom, where practices like Aboriginal dadirri (deep listening), Amazonian ayahuasca healing, and Tibetan dream yoga have harnessed waking dreams for millennia to diagnose illness, heal trauma, and guide communities.
The cost? A mental health crisis steeped in cultural amnesia. Veterans reliving combat in flashbacks are sedated with antipsychotics instead of guided to reframe trauma through waking dreams. Artists and innovators are medicated into “focus,” their daydreams—the wellspring of human creativity—stigmatized as ADHD. Capitalism thrives on this alienation, profiting from our fragmentation and disconnection by selling pills to numb symptoms and gadgets to “hack” sleep, all while ignoring accessible, ancient solutions.
The paradigm began shifting when neuroscience finally recognized lucid dreaming (awareness of dreaming while asleep) through EEG studies. Once mocked as pseudoscience, lucid dreaming is now clinically applied to treat PTSD nightmares and has spawned a lucrative market of sleep-tracking gadgets. Yet this acceptance came with constraints: lucid dreaming requires extensive training, making it inaccessible to many who could benefit.
In contrast, waking dreams—achieved through breathwork and visualization—offer similar therapeutic benefits without the steep learning curve. Where lucid dreaming demands sleep manipulation, waking dreams harness our innate capacity for creative imagery during waking times. This distinction reveals a lingering bias: Western science still privileges rare, technology-dependent states over accessible, embodied practices.
As research increasingly shows that both sleep and waking dreams engage overlapping neural networks for emotional processing, we must question why some forms of dreaming remain more “legitimate” than others. The question isn’t whether waking dreams hold power but who benefits from pretending they don’t. Dismissing these states protects systems that equate conformity with sanity and profit with progress. To heal, we must reclaim the right to dream awake—to honour the visions that defy cages of “rationality” and create new worlds.
The Dreaming Continuum: Beyond Sleep
Modern neuroscience now confirms what Indigenous and holistic traditions have always known—the boundaries between sleeping and waking dreams are porous. Across cultures and throughout history, people have harnessed waking dreams through meditation, vision quests, guided imagery, and psychedelics to access the same creative and healing insights we typically associate with nocturnal dreams.
Research shows that most dreams are forgotten within ten minutes of waking, which explains why many people feel they never dream. However, there’s a solution: waking dreams—those vivid, immersive states achieved through breathwork and visualization—offer all the insight of nighttime dreams with clear remembrance and agency.
How Your Dream Insights—Sleeping and Waking—Guide You
Dream themes reveal our psyche’s attempts to course-correct:
- Being chased often reflects avoidance of a waking-life issue
- Being naked in public typically represents vulnerability
- Lost or trapped scenarios may indicate feeling helpless and aimless
These metaphors aren’t random—they’re your brain’s native language for problem-solving. The trauma survivors I have worked with demonstrate this powerfully. Through Guided Dreaming, they often discover that visualized scenarios of an imagined shield or a helpful ally provide the same relief as traditional exposure therapy—but with a greater sense of embodied agency.
The real question is, what will you do to implement the insights from your dreams?
Reclaiming Your Mind’s GPS
You can begin accessing your dreams’ insights with these practices:
- Dream Journaling — Place a notebook or your smartphone by your bed and record any dream content upon waking. This simple practice not only improves dream recall but also offers psychological insights over time. Write in the present tense as if you are in the dream.
- Daydreaming — Try closing your eyes for ten minutes while breathing slowly and deeply; allow imageries to arise spontaneously.
- Dream Incubation — Write a specific question before sleep or daydreaming (e.g., “How might I approach this problem differently?”). Your dreaming mind will often answer in metaphors that offer fresh perspectives.
- Dream Interpretation — Analyze the characters, settings, plot, and emotions in your dream, and assess how they may relate to your waking life. If possible, share your dream with a non-judgmental friend or a dream group. Different perspectives always bring unexpected realizations.
I have been testing various AI dream interpretation apps for almost two years, including Elsewhere Dream Journal, ChatGPT, and Deepseek, to analyze my own and other people’s dreams. They are all very helpful in interpreting symbols and contextualizing meanings. The Elsewhere Dream Journal App, in particular, can generate not one but six different interpretations from different lenses, including Freudian, Jungian, and Biblical. It even generates AI art based on your dream journal in your preferred visual style.
Vision for a Dream-Embracing Society in the Age of AI, Climate Crisis, and Geopolitical Conflicts
The future of dream research must honour what traditions from Tibetan Buddhism to Aboriginal Dreamtime have always known: consciousness exists on a spectrum. Amazonian shamans diagnose illnesses in visions. Corporate innovators use guided imagery to solve engineering challenges. These aren’t supernatural phenomena but demonstrations of our innate capacity for navigational dreaming—what I call the “GPS of Life.”
As we face collective uncertainty, this expanded understanding of dreaming becomes revolutionary. It means:
- Your nightmare about being unprepared for an exam might hold keys to workplace challenges
- That recurring dream about tsunamis could be your mind’s way of rehearsing for upheavals
- The daydream you dismiss as zoning out might contain the solution to a creative block
The divide between waking and sleeping dreams is artificial. Your mind is always dreaming—sometimes with your eyes closed, sometimes with them open. Your task is to pay attention.
Dream Your Future
In a world fractured by climate disasters and geopolitical strife, dreams become our shared tool for resilience. Imagine a world where dreams are not dismissed as fleeting nonsense but revered as portals to our highest wisdom. A society where classrooms teach children to decode their dreams and visions as earnestly as math equations, where workplaces honour afternoon siestas to nurture creative insights, and where mental health care focuses not on suppressing symptoms with drugs but on the question: “What are your dreams trying to tell you?”
As AI-driven automation displaces workers, waking dream workshops help individuals reimagine their purpose. A laid-off factory worker dreams of mentoring kids—and launches a robotics tutoring service. Companies adopt “dream circles” where teams solve AI ethics dilemmas through metaphorical role-play (e.g., “What if algorithms were trees?”). These exercises unlock lateral thinking, preparing minds for unpredictable futures.
Dreams bypass apathy by making climate grief personal. A farmer’s nightmare of barren fields becomes a catalyst for drought-resistant crop trials. Indigenous communities, whose dream rituals encode millennia of ecological wisdom, partner with scientists to revive sustainable practices. Schools teach “climate dreaming” workshops, where students visualize thriving ecosystems, then design real-world projects from those visions.
Dreams speak in symbols that transcend borders and ideological divides, revealing shared human fears and hopes. In conflict zones, counselling workshops invite adversaries to share dreams. A Ukrainian and Russian teen both dream of crumbling homes, and an Israeli and Palestinian mother both dream of losing loved ones—not as propaganda, but as human truth. These raw, metaphorical narratives build empathy faster than politicized debates. NGOs train “dream mediators” to identify recurring symbols such as water scarcity and co-create solutions.
In mental health, dreams become frontline therapy. Clinics train practitioners in trauma-informed dream analysis, where nightmares are reframed as the psyche’s urgent memos, not disorders to erase. A veteran’s recurring flashback of combat transforms into a guided waking dream where they rebuild the scene with agency, reducing PTSD symptoms without re-traumatization. Schools embed “dream check-ins” in counselling sessions, helping students decode anxiety dreams about exams or socializing into actionable plans. Communities host dream circles, where sharing a nightmare about wildfires or displacement becomes a collective catharsis—and a springboard for local climate action.
In schools, classrooms ditch rote memorization for dream literacy. Children learn to journal and metaphor-map their dreams, sharpening emotional intelligence and creative problem-solving. A teen’s dream of navigating a maze becomes a physics lesson on algorithms; a nightmare about melting ice caps sparks a student-led recycling initiative. Teachers trained in waking dream practices help students view dreams as dialogues with their subconscious, ancestors, or the natural world. Universities offer degrees in OneiroScience, merging neuroscience, anthropology, and ethics to study the role of dreams in innovation and healing.
This is a world unshackled from the tyranny of “productivity.” Here, dream-sharing conversations replace meaningless chitchats, fostering empathy as strangers find common ground in the surreal tapestries of their subconscious. Cities pulse with dream-inspired art—murals of flying whales, symphonies composed from dream melodies, and novels birthed from dystopian nightmares transformed into hope.
We prioritize rest and sleep as sacred: homes bask in peace, workplaces embrace flexible schedules, and tech companies design apps that facilitate wellbeing instead of hijacking attention. This is no utopian fantasy—it’s a rebellion. A reclaiming of the intuitive, messy, glorious parts of being human that capitalism has gaslit us into suppressing. By honouring dreams, we honour our innate creativity, our shared humanity, our capacity to reimagine reality. The future isn’t built by grinding harder—it’s dreamed awake, together.
Let’s build a world where every dreamer is seen not as a distracted fool but as an architect of tomorrow. The revolution begins when we look within. This isn’t fantasy—it’s reclaiming our birthright to dream and act. When we trust and honour our dreams as our inner GPS of life, we build resilient minds—and societies—that can weather any storm.
***
Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.
