Why We Dream

What if I told you that we have access to a deeper intelligence that transcends the waking mind?

I have been analyzing dreams for people from all over the world over many decades. I observe this deeper intelligence at work. It is older and more profound and primal than waking consciousness.

The dreaming mind knows things you don’t consciously know – like which experiences hurt you, which memories are unresolved, which identities are shifting.

It doesn’t speak in words.
It speaks in images, metaphors, and emotional symbolism.

It is an ancient language that some part of you still understands.

Why dreams don’t stay in memory

Dreams happen mainly during REM sleep, when the brain is highly active. But the chemicals responsible for turning experiences into long-term memories – especially norepinephrine – are greatly reduced.

Even though the brain is busy generating intense imagery and emotions, the memory-recording machinery is dialed way down. It’s like the dream happens on “scratch paper” instead of permanent storage.

When you wake up, the normal chemicals start reflowing across your synapses, and the scratch paper fades. Your brain states shift rapidly when waking up, and by the time you’re fully alert, the fragile dream memory has already dissolved.

The thing is – you don’t need to remember your dreams for the healing to occur. When you have an emotional breakthrough in a dream – you wake up changed.

Why dreams seem foreign

When we do manage to remember a dream and write it down, something interesting happens. The brain state during dreaming is very different from the waking state and so, when we revisit what we wrote days or weeks later, it seems like someone else wrote it.

The ideas seem foreign because they were not saved in memory. It is like we have transcribed and are accessing someone else’s story.

When you're awake, the reasoning and narrative parts of the brain are dominant, and your sense of identity is stronger.

But when you dream, logic networks are muted, emotional and visual areas are stronger, and the sense of self is fluid.

So, when you later read the dream, you’re reading something that was created by a different mental state. The emotional tone that made the dream feel meaningful is gone. The narrative often appears disjointed or bizarre because your waking mind is now trying to interpret something created by a different state of consciousness.

You are more than what you remember

Most of life is lived at the surface.

We wake up, think our thoughts, tell the story of who we are, and move through the day inside that familiar narrative. We believe that this is us: our history, our personality, our preferences, our wounds, the facts of what we remember.

But memory is just a thin film on top of something much deeper.

We spend almost half our lives asleep, accessing an awareness where the surface layer dissolves. The careful narrator goes quiet. The part of us that says, “I am this person, living this life, at this age, in this time” steps aside. And something older begins to speak.

Dreams are not random. They are a different kind of knowing.

In dreams, the psyche reveals that it has its own intelligence – it seems to know the dreamer better than they know themselves. It takes what is unfinished in us, what aches, what hurts, what we refuse to see, and it reshapes it.

Dreams remember what the waking mind forgets: that we are more than the person fighting for survival.

A deeper mode of consciousness

Whenever people enter deep visionary states – through meditation, breathwork, or certain plant medicines – they often describe something similar:

Time loosens.
The narrative self becomes transparent.
And there is a sense of stepping into a wider field of being.

Not a memory.
Not imagination.
Something more like returning to a source you didn’t realize you had left.

Many describe it as remembering themselves before they were themselves.

A consciousness without story.
A self without borders.
A presence that feels ancient, familiar, and deeply safe.

It suggests something extraordinary:

We are more than the sum of our memories.
We are more than the identity we rehearse.
We are more than the life we think we're living.

The source of enlightenment

There is an intelligence in us that has been shaping us all along – guiding, repairing, reorganizing – outside of awareness. You don’t have to believe in anything spiritual to feel this.

The body heals cuts without being told how. The heart synchronizes its rhythm to emotion. The subconscious resolves conflicts the waking mind didn’t even know existed.

This is why nightmares are actually a positive sign that power is re-awakening in the psyche.

Why would we be designed this way?

Just as the body has a paralytic feature that keeps us from acting out on our dreams – we need a safe space to heal and explore change. The brain needs to experiment without consequences.

In this ‘sandbox mode’ we can rehearse social interactions without embarrassment. We replay trauma in a safer, symbolic way and can test actions without physical danger.

Something in us is always trying to bring us back into wholeness. It works to eliminate the barriers that would stunt our authenticity. Daily life would have us conform to other’s expectations – but when we dream, we hear our own drummer.

Whether we call that the unconscious, the Self, the soul, or the living intelligence of nature doesn’t really matter.

What matters is this: You are not alone inside yourself.

Your healing is not something you have to force.
You don’t have to earn worthiness by understanding everything.
You don’t need to solve your life entirely from the surface mind.

Something in you already knows the way.

The dreams know.
The body knows.
The deeper current of the psyche knows.

During the day – you live the story. During dreaming – you edit the story, but eventually, the story becomes who you are.

And sometimes, when the thinking mind quiets – during sleep, meditation, deep reflection, or moments of awe – we can feel it:

A steady presence, patient and ancient, working on our behalf.

Not separate from us.
But not limited to the version of who we think we are.

Life designed you to be unique and has been guiding your evolution since the day you were born.