quit fucking around. that’s my epiphany of the last few days. but without my newest insights into sleep science those words seem like betrayal. i fuck around and find out and that’s my excuse to smoke a lot of weed. can the positive effect of this be achieved in any more serious way? dream science has a surprising and sexy answer to that.

dream brains on steroids

our dream brains are like weed brains on steroids. dream brains tend to prefer weak associations and non-obvious links to explore possibilities. cannabis blocks rem sleep and this meaning-making function that dreams play in their unconventional way. the trippiness of dreams is an exploration in how current events fit into our big picture development and what’s next. it’s the most literal and beautiful brainstorming. so am i a dreamer or a stoner?

replace don’t remove

addiction recovery teaches a crucial principle: replace rather than remove. instead of stopping to fuck around intellectually by smoking weed i do so by opening the floodgates of dreams. that’s the hypothesis and a lot of its inspiration comes from the book “when brains dream”. the harvard researchers antonio zadra and robert stickgold developed the nextup model. network exploration to understand possibilities.

through shakespeare-level psychodramas, dreams help explore possible meanings of experience by blending it absurdly with otherwise inaccessible memories. therefore dreaming brains are natural masters of fucking around and finding out. they’re incentivized to prefer weak associations over strong ones. they don’t turn oranges into aperol spritz. that’s too boring. rather they are transformed into the glowing sun in the skiing mountains around vienna where they had those marvelous orange squeeze juice machines. just an example.

weed is a vampire doctor

our dream brains are natural pioneers and unafraid to take risks. they prefer perilous shortcuts over the well-used neural highways. that’s exactly what weed pretends to do. thc suppresses rem sleep which is the sleep phase in which we dream. their dream life gets drained like a vampire pretending to be one’s doctor but then sucking all your blood. that leaves chronic stoners with a dead and bland inner world. life seems to go in circles because the dream brain has no space to employ its talents. when people quit cannabis, they experience ‘rem rebound’ which is fancy to say they get flooded with a tsunami of super intense dreams. so instead of removing my intellectual fucking around, i’m encouraging my brain’s natural fucking around through dream work.

salvador dalí with a key

yesterday night i practiced dream incubation for the first time. it’s like salvador dalí drifting into a micro nap with a key in his hands. when the key drops he wakes up with a flash of inspiration on the question he went to rest with. dream incubation is simple but powerful. yesterday night i ditched my joint and instead primed my mind to remember my dreams. and ta-da! i woke up with romantically absurd pictures of el salvador.

a friend was showing me his favorite lush green beach, but it was full of trash. that was the dream’s hook to drill down on a “despite of” mindset. despite the trash, we were laughing, and my friend was showing me the places in the green floor where he sleeps and works out. there was a real felt blessedness in the scene, and it opened my bird-like freedom urge to go have a good look at el salvador. it was a very charming scene. then i noticed the vital waves being weakened to a pitiful state by a shallow water set some distance in front of the beach. it made the waves like chaotic defensive sneaking weak animals, exerting much effort to reach the shore.

the little ghost in the well

upon waking, i remembered the much-loved children’s story das kleine gespenst (the little ghost) by otfried preußler. my fuzzy memory projects the same feeling of loving pity onto that story—the little childlike ghost being faced with pure fear and rejection by everybody despite being absolutely harmless. one scene i particularly remember: when the ghost fell into a well and looked black because of the shadows, crying and not helped out for days. in the original story, when the little ghost finally wakes during daylight, sunlight turns him black instead of white, and he becomes frightened and misunderstood. the moral of both the ghost and the waves is that we nourish our demons through rejection. they feel that injustice is done to them and may take on the evil nature that we project onto them. the team of our inner demons in psychology is called our shadow.

now follows a tiny interpretation of the lessons from this dream. my brain fucked around and confronted me with those scenarios to find out what my emotional reaction is. this real and raw emotional experience i had is very different from waking rational contemplation of my psyche. even the most rational of scientists can’t help but to feel moved and changed by dreaming in great emotion about a dead loved one. similarly i can’t help looking differently at the part of me which i see as the source of shame and self-sabotage. my psychological shadow. the dream urges me to relate to it with instinctive care like anybody would towards a drowning puppy. or a misunderstood little ghost which fell in a well and can’t get out.