Category Archives: About This

Sleep on It: How Snoozing Makes You Smarter

During slumber, our brain engages in data analysis, from strengthening memories to solving problems

Sleep on It: How Snoozing Makes You Smarter: Scientific American

Sleep, Memory

Sleep, Memory by Allan Coukell

Scientists have known for 50 years that the brain handles short- and long-term memories in different ways.

Now researchers in Boston are contributing to a growing understanding of the role of sleep in transforming memory.

Verbal/Visual

I consider myself to be a pretty verbal person. I like words and reading and writing. If I had to explain something I’d probably try to explain it in words as opposed to drawing a picture or making a video or doing an interpretive dance.

I have a voice in my head and it seems mostly to communicate using language. It’s more complicated than that but mostly when I’m consciously thinking to myself I seem to be thinking using English.

It’s profoundly fascinating to me that my subconscious mind gets its messages across through visual imagery. The whole point of dreams seems to be about thoughts being translated into a series of images. Like in a movie. Like the most elemental and private way that my thoughts can expressed is through images rather than words.

When I was in grad school (in writing) I worked with a Dr. Lee Odell on some projects about teaching students in writing classes how to communicate visually — like not just linear text but using typography, layout, and imagery to get their ideas across. He got religion on the subject late in his career and seemed to always be arguing with himself about whether students would be better served learning straight-up essay writing or whether we should teach these newfangled visual techniques. I remember walking in Troy with him one day and he turned to me and said:

In the Bible it says "In the beginning was the Word." It doesn’t say "In the beginning was the Picture."

Exploring dreams further makes me wonder if "in the beginning" my thoughts are actually more visual and pictorial than they are linguistic or verbal.

I actively resisted the notion of writing my dreams down for a long time. People would say to me "write them down! keep a notebook by your bedside!" What I didn’t like was the idea of having to translate everything that happened in the dream into words, and thus lose so much of the detail and the essence of the emotion. It’s like if you went and saw a movie and then had to write down for someone else the plot summary. You might be able to communicate the main points of the characters and what happened, but you would lose the richness of the scenery, the non-verbal communication, the costuming, the lighting, the blocking of the scenes… For a long time it seemed really gut-wrenching to me to write text down that didn’t capture any of that.

But, what the hell. I’m happy to be able to remember more clearly the dreams I have written down, and it’s fun to map the patterns and relationships among them. But it is most definitely a translation exercise in trying to capture the essence of visual thinking in words.

When thought is made perceptible

From A Cognitive Theory of Dreams by Calvin S. Hall:

A dream is a succession of
images, predominantly visual in quality, which are experienced during
sleep. A dream commonly has one or more scenes, several characters in
addition to the dreamer, and a sequence of actions and interactions
usually involving the dreamer. It resembles a motion picture or
dramatic production in which the dreamer is a participant-observer.
Although a dream is an hallucination, the dreamer experiences it as
he does any perceptual phenomenon. Scenes, people, objects, and
actions are experienced as though they were impressing themselves on
the senses from the external world. The world of dreams, it goes
without saying, is a world of pure projection.

The principal thesis of this paper is that these images of a
dream are the embodiment of thoughts. They are a medium by which a
psychological process, cognition, is transformed into a form that can
be perceived.
Although images are the only means by which ideas find
sensible expression in dreams, other media such as words, numbers,
gestures, and pictures are employed in waking life for making one’s
thoughts known. When thought is made perceptible, it is said to be
communicated. Unlike the communications of waking life, which may
have an audience of millions, the audience of a dream consists of
only one person, the dreamer himself. A dream is a highly private
showing of the dreamer’s thoughts.


Hall, C. S. (1953). A cognitive theory of dreams. The Journal of General Psychology, 49, 273-282.  Abridged version in M. F. DeMartino (Ed.). (1959). Dreams and Personality Dynamics (pp. 123-134). Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.

A note about people

One of the most fascinating things to me about my dreams is the people who appear in it, like characters populating a sprawling novel that doesn’t always hold together.

Some people in my dreams are regular fixtures in my daily life. Other nighttime visitors are people I haven’t spoken to in 20 years and probably wouldn’t think about at all, except they keep appearing to me. Still others are just faceless blobs, remembered the next morning only as "a woman" or "an old man." And then there are the people who are dearly important to me, yet who never seem to grace my sleep.

In any case, it’s weird for me to write about friends and long forgotten friends, sometimes in intimate or strange situations. I hope no one is troubled by seeing themselves in the darkest reaches of my psyche.

First post explaining how this works

For years now I’ve been having really incredible dreams, the kind you want to tell people about the next day. In fact, I do tell people about them and everyone agrees my dreams are more intense and more vivid than most people’s.

I have been keeping notebooks with my dreams in them for a while. Lately I’ve felt like I should publish these on the interwebs — maybe because the act of sharing them more widely would feel like analysis, maybe because paper seems kind of dead in this day and age. In any case, I finally set up a blog.

I have a few guidelines I’m going to try and follow:

  • The post itself is going to be as accurate a description of the dream as I can recall. I’m going to try and force myself to be completely accurate, without editing out any of the really embarrassing parts (though I’ll be tempted and I can’t promise I won’t ever give in.)
  • Any commentary I have I will put in a comment on the post. I’ll often provide my own analysis, I think.
  • I’ll try to write the post as soon as I can, but it sometimes takes me until mid-day to smooth out all the strands of the dream.
  • I’ll also be going back in time through my old notebooks to document previous dreams. This will take some time, and will also mean that the blog grows in reverse more that it grows forward.
  • I’m going to tag the posts with common themes. This is another key reason I want to do this, so I can cross-reference between dreams more easily than on paper.
  • All people will be noted just by first name, so as not to be too obvious about who I’m referencing. But everyone knows who they are.