Night Shift

At fourteen, I developed an obsession with my local library. A massive building at the intersection of three busy streets. The heavy metal doors opened into a silence that belonged only here. Inside, the stacks divided the vastness, some sections wide enough to linger, some barely enough to reach. The air carried old paper and living staleness.

I used to wander the aisles without purpose, dragging my fingers along the spines, slow enough to feel the tap from one book to the next. Wishing the knowing could pass through my fingertips.

One day, a title stopped me: The Interpretation of Dreams.

I pulled it from the shelf and stood frozen. Freud's premise was simple: dreams are not random. They are expressions of unconscious wishes and conflicts that the conscious mind normally suppresses.

Had I been missing it? A coded language, sent to myself every night?

I sat on the floor, unable to escape those pages. The library closed around me. I left with the book and the puzzle inside it. There was only one problem. I could not remember my dreams.

Do you notice your dreams?

Much to my disappointment, or perhaps amusement, dreams are labour.

Freud's intuition was correct about the function. Wrong about the mechanism. His model placed the unconscious at the centre: wishes, symbols, repressed desires pushing toward the surface. Compelling. Coherent. And mostly unaligned with what neuroscience later found.

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REM sleep, the stage where vivid dreaming occurs, is the only period when the brain is almost entirely free of noradrenaline, the neurochemical most associated with stress. Emotional memories reactivate during this window, but they do so in a neurochemically calm environment. The brain revisits what upset you, without being upset.

Matthew Walker at UC Berkeley calls this overnight therapy. Participants in his lab who slept between two viewings of distressing images showed measurable reduction in amygdala reactivity the next day. Those who stayed awake showed none.

This is why trauma survivors often dream repeatedly of the same event. The brain is attempting to metabolise what it could not integrate while awake. When the process works, the memory softens its hold. When it fails, the dream returns. The mind circling the same scene, trying again to work through what life could not digest.

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Emotional regulation is only one theory among several.

Finnish cognitive neuroscientist Antti Revonsuo proposed a different frame. His threat simulation theory argues that dreaming is an ancient rehearsal system. The brain selects threatening experiences and replays them in varied combinations during sleep, practising survival. This explains why the most common dream emotions are fear and anxiety. The brain is running drills.

Dreams also appear to solve problems. Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett asked participants to focus on a real problem before sleep each night for one week. Half dreamed about their problem. Of those, the majority woke believing their dream had offered a solution. During REM, the brain makes unusual associations, linking ideas that conscious thought cannot reach. The structure loosens. Logic steps aside. Occasionally, we wake having found what we were looking for.

All three functions can coexist. The same REM architecture that strips the charge from painful memories also rehearses threat and incubates insight.

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Not everyone agrees the night is doing anything meaningful. Some researchers argue dreams are simply the cortex weaving narrative from random neural firing, imposing meaning on electrical noise.

Research on dream content suggests otherwise. The experiences most likely to appear are those coded as emotionally significant during the day. The things that mattered, even briefly. The brain is sorting by salience, deciding what needs more processing before morning.

Through dreams, the brain is doing something biological and deeply generous. It is trying, while you sleep, to help you survive what happened while you were awake.

Freud was right about one thing. Dreams speak in images rather than plain language. In his catalogue, water meant birth. Flying meant desire. Balloons, towers, staircases, each assigned a fixed meaning regardless of the dreamer. The same interpretation, for every symbol, for every person who ever slept.

Where he went wrong was the catalogue itself. The symbolism is not universal. It is yours alone, shaped by whatever your brain considered worth returning to.

If, like me, you struggle to remember dreams, dream journalling is where I started. Keep a notebook beside your bed and write down anything you recall the moment you wake. Not a narrative. Not an interpretation. Just fragments. An image. A feeling. A colour. A name.

What you are capturing is data. All night, the brain sorts by salience, deciding what requires more processing. The fragments that surface are the ones it held onto. Over time, you will understand your patterns. What remains unresolved. Your preoccupations. The people who still carry charge. The fears still running their drills.

I dream of Andre when I am working through rejection. I dream of a witch from a German book illustration when I am afraid.

This is your private language, and it is worth learning.

What do you dream of?

^{This is a space for exploration and reflection. Nothing in this email is medical, psychological, or therapeutic advice. These ideas are general insights on human behaviour, not treatment or diagnosis. Each reader’s situation is unique and deserves the right kind of support. If you are struggling or in crisis, please contact a licensed mental health professional.}

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