Each Night a New World: Building Resilience Through Dreams

Mural of the "Derry Girls" from the TV comedy of the same name, near the Derry City Walls.

Source: K. Mitch Hodge / Unsplash

Have you seen the Netflix series "Derry Girls"? I know, I was late to the party, but I just watched it. A teen sitcom set in the final years of the Troubles, in Northern Ireland, the final episode I saw interweaves the Good Friday Agreement vote with two of the girls turning 18 and officially entering adulthood. The country is changing, and so are each of the characters; old structures are giving way to new. Some resist them, some embrace them; no one can escape them. The story made me think a lot about change: how we approach shifting paradigms, and the key role nighttime dreams play in adapting to these changes.

Resilience by Inoculation

From artificial intelligence to shifting geo-political protocols, today’s society is rapidly re-configuring the world many of us thought we knew. We talk about living in a time of enormous change, but the truth is that life is always changing. We move through life cycles, new places to live, new relationships, new jobs, flat tires, and missed buses. Step out the door, and each day, no matter how carefully planned, you’re always going to find a surprise.

Accepting and accommodating change is the very definition of resiliency. Whether we take change in stride or fall off an emotional precipice every time we encounter something unexpected, it all comes down to our flexibility in approaching new structures. The more we learn to fluidly move through transitions, the more we strengthen our ability to meet life’s next shift. In fact, it may be that the little changes are what build resilience to the big ones.

Remember sleepovers? Or visits to your relatives’ house? Similar to the inoculation process of vaccines, Rutter (2013) argues that brief instances of facing a stressful or surmountable challenge are how resilience is cultivated. New environments are an example of this. Among the research he draws from is the work of Stacey, Dearden, Pill, and Robinson (1970, as cited in Rutter, 2013) that showed that children who experienced short, pleasant separations from their parents later coped better with more intense hospital stays. Also falling in Rutter’s review is Lyons and Parker’s (2007) work around young squirrel monkeys who were taken from their familiar environment for an hour each week. These monkeys had reduced sensitivity to later stressful situations, including measurable effects on the neuroendocrine system.

In other words, these studies indicate that getting out of one’s comfort zone and facing, rather than avoiding, manageable stressors in little experiences developed an ability to handle future change. Unfortunately for most of us, though, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut and avoid venturing out of our normal routines. Face it: Everyone likes to know what’s going to happen next.

Luckily, we have a built-in mechanism for challenging that: our nighttime dreams.

Waking to a New World

The new experiences of dreams expand our sense of self.

Source: cyano66 / iStock

“We come out on a clearing, but are blocked by a river. There’s no raft. I have to get everyone across. I look deep into the water and see stones just below the surface. There’s a way over, after all!”

Snippet from an action movie? A summer vacation gone wrong? Or could it be part of our body’s innate adaptive mechanisms at work, through dreaming?

Sleep, and we wake up to a new world in our dreams. It’s a place replete with different structures, unique rules, unusual components, and new goals. It has challenges, and even big risks (I’m going to fall into a hole! They are coming at me!). And yet, we enter the world of dream “all in,” often in medias res. Whatever the situation, we immediately act within and upon it, never questioning the structure itself, and only rarely wondering what we are doing there.

The dreamer, as "I,” moves through this new, unfamiliar world of dream with agency. We interact with the strange components, make decisions around them, and actively engage with whatever comes our way. While in waking time you might freak out if a road closure obliges you to take a new way to work, in a nighttime dream, it’s likely you could be flying through the air above your usual freeway without missing a beat. Then, as abruptly as we enter this strange new world, we leave it. Waking up, we enter yet another new place: a new day.

Kahn (2013) looks at dreams as part of a self-organizing process, where new iterations of self are created through interacting in the changed environments of dream. Key is our sense of agency and our identification with self. The “I” of the dream navigates the new and shifting environments, which are often more dramatic than any waking encounter, thus expanding the sense of what is possible for the self. In doing so, the waking self is expanded.

Dreaming Essential Reads

What Are Dreams Made Of?

A Dream Psychology Perspective on 3i/Atlas

New environments, new paradigms—whether nighttime dreams or waking scenarios, anytime we are taken from a familiar environment and plunked into a new one, we encounter a new set of problems to solve. Interacting with it enlarges our perspectives, adding new tools in our adaptive toolbox, prepping us for the next time something comes out of the blue.

"Derry Girls," Adaptation, and a Dreaming Practice

At the end of the "Derry Girls" series, Erin sums it up, calling change scary, exciting, something she wishes wouldn’t happen, and something we can’t avoid—sentiments we all share. Then she adds that, anyway, change might lead to something better.

Change is not only the constant background to our life; embraced, it is the way we adapt and move forward. Recording dreams on a nightly basis, as a practice, focuses us to examine the different worlds, sensations, and experiences we visit when asleep and our capacity to navigate through them. This simple exercise, done day after day, takes us through scenarios of continuous change, expanding our innate capacity for resilience.