Dream Logic

Seeing through our stories

The mind is a storyteller, even when we’re asleep. Have you ever noticed how a sensation—a full bladder, a cold breeze—slips into your dream, reshaping the narrative as it plays out? Say your big toe hurts. The pain signal makes its way to your sleeping brain, and suddenly in your dream you’re limping because a car ran over your foot. 

The body offers up a feeling, and the mind makes up a story to contain and contextualize it. It’s fiction, of course. But the brain is good at fiction. It’s kind of its whole deal. 

In some explanations, this is what a dream is—a way for the brain to process, integrate, or make sense of emotions and sensations by weaving them into a narrative, using the raw ingredients of context available to it: a movie you watched, an old friend you thought of, a story in the news.

This happens in our waking life too. A feeling surfaces, fueled by hormones or fatigue, alcohol or hanger, and the brain immediately reaches for what’s at hand to give it a shape and meaning. It’s your spouse’s fault for not emptying the dishwasher. It’s your boss’s fault for being a dick. Capitalism’s fault for wearing you down. The story fans the feeling, giving it air and room to grow. 

Sometimes, when an emotion is too unwieldy, the brain will turn it into a physical sensation or symptom. Rage settles into the back as a constant ache. Grief blooms in the chest as a chronic cough. Angst becomes a pickaxe in the temple, fog in the mind, numbness in the limbs, revolt in the gut. 

The body slots the intangible into something you can name and attempt to soothe. But the harder you fight it in the realm of the physical, the more stubborn it grows, your frustration feeding the very thing it aims to fix.

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Like a dream weaving pain into a story, collective feelings—fear, anger, grief—demand narratives to give them shape. These stories explain the intangible, point to villains, and offer a sense of direction, even if the logic is as slippery as a dream’s. They take shape online and in conversation; you can watch them assuming form. Racism, colonialism, MAGA, white men, trans people, the libs, the Jews—this is who and what we’re mad at, and why this feeling of fear, rage, and disgust is all their fault. This is what we need to excise, here’s where we need to cut. 

Still, the story is a fiction, a shaky narrative held together by collective emotion and expert meaning-makers whispering in our ears. To keep the story intact you have to filter out much more than you allow in. 

The more you consider the full range of available facts—and see how others elevate in their stories what you dismiss in yours—the harder it is to buy into any one narrative. They all hinge on selective reasoning. Eventually you develop X-ray vision, see that they’re all the same feelings running around out there on the left, right, and otherwise, just wearing different clothes.

This will not stop. Forces arise, winds blow. History is a long sweep of energies rising from the unseen, passing through the mind’s meaning-making machinery, and hardening into action. Most of us are not equipped to distinguish feelings from the meaning we give them, and the destruction they spur us toward. This is why we need spiritual guides. Without some kind of framework that lets us channel and transmute these feelings and forces, things go badly. 

Mystical forces demand a response that transcends reason—a response rooted in ritual, symbolism, and connection to something greater than ourselves. Whether through spiritual guides, healers, or communal rituals, we need help navigating the realm of myth, energy, and spirit to grapple with collective pain.

There are forces in the shadows—narratives and energies—working to derange us. You can see it in the widespread cheering for murder. You can see it in the ugliness and hate, the desire for the destruction of our political enemies—not just their humiliation or defeat, but their actual deaths. 

My unease started percolating when friends were rooting for the deaths of those who declined to get vaccinated against Covid-19. It grew larger with the gruesome celebrations in the wake of the Hamas attacks of October 7th, and later, when many publicly wished that the attempted assassination of Trump had succeeded.

Now my social circle is ablaze with people excusing—even celebrating—the murder of a health insurance CEO they’d previously never heard of, shot by a rich guy who was never insured by the company. The dream logic isn’t even trying to make sense anymore. It’s raw, limbic response, primal and unleashed.

(There are plenty of examples on the right as well, of course, but my social sphere is dominated by progressives, so this is what I directly experience online and in conversation.)

My moral alarms are flashing bright red. There’s a sickness in the collective spirit—a nihilism and malaise that thrive when emotional undercurrents are ignored. When we insist that we’re purely rational beings operating on just the facts, ma’am. We need to recognize this sickness for what it is before we can hope to heal. I no longer believe that exclusively reason-based arguments about toxic polarization are up to the task.

We have to loosen our logic, let some energy workers into the ethereal layer that’s running us, invisible and thrumming. I don’t know how to actualize this on any sizable scale, but it’s a call I’m heeding in my own little life. I’m looking for teachers, guides, and practices to help me see through my own stories to the naked forces and feelings underneath. 

Ultimately, dialing back our collective derangement will take more than individual reckoning. It will require cultural spaces for processing these forces, where fear, rage, and grief can be transmuted before they harden into hate. Our growing separation is both a symptom and driver of this sickness. There’s a kind of healing that can only be done together.

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In the mind-body model of health, it’s said that simply recognizing the emotional origins of pain can start to alleviate its symptoms. When you bring repressed emotions to conscious awareness, the brain no longer needs to express them through the body. The feeling can then dissolve from the solidity of the physical world into the lighter, more malleable realm of meaning.

The Greek author Plutarch said, “What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.” This is a truth that cuts both ways. It holds both promise and peril, depending on what we cultivate within.