What Are Waking Dreams, and Why Should You Care?

Dreaming is a vital part of our existence, essential to memory consolidation and emotional processing. Waking dreams allow us to dream while awake, significantly enhancing self-awareness, creative problem-solving, and the ability to find meaning in life experiences.

Indigenous cultures around the world recognize and intentionally cultivate waking dreams for both personal and community well-being. However, mainstream Western societies often view waking dreams as abnormal or pathological, attempting to eliminate or control them. This approach can result in feelings of isolation and stigma, leaving people feeling diminished and unsupported in their spiritual experiences.

Waking dreams are natural phenomena that occur when people experience dreamlike mental activities while awake. This experience often emerges during the hypnogogic stages as we drift in and out of sleep, as well as periods of deep contemplation or creative inspiration. It represents a hybrid mental state on the edge between wakefulness and sleep, where imagination and reality blur.

In a recent Facebook poll, one person shared the experience of having waking dreams during a long road trip, trying to stay awake to keep the driver alert. A musician described entering a trance-like state that enhances her songwriting, allowing her to draw inspiration directly from her dreams, “as if the floodgates to my muse are wide open.” Another respondent indicated that they have experienced waking dreams during meditation and as side effects of certain painkillers, highlighting the diverse triggers and experiences associated with the waking dream phenomenon.

I experienced waking dreams for the first time in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. I was under immense stress from running a business while homeschooling my children to protect my elders from contracting the disease. This mounting stress and anxiety resulted in severe shoulder pain. Conventional therapies, including physiotherapy, chiropractic care, massage, acupuncture, and counselling, had failed to provide relief, which led me to seek treatment through hypnotherapy. Unexpectedly, during hypnosis, I had vivid dreams of being underwater and encountering a gentle octopus that shapeshifted into a healing bubble of light, where I felt my dream body expanding and dissolving.

My waking dream experience provided immediate pain relief and offered valuable insights to help me navigate life’s challenges. Water symbolizes unconscious emotions, while the octopus represents flexibility, adaptation, regeneration, and transformation. The octopus, with its many arms, also reminded me of my busy, multitasking lifestyle. These dream symbols inspired me to embrace adaptability and reshape my perspective on challenges, empowering me to overcome anxiety and break free from feeling trapped. This transformation taught me to manage my emotions and release tension in stressful situations.

Neuroscience and psychology concur that dreaming is an active mental state that helps consolidate memories and process emotions. Most dreaming occurs during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep when the prefrontal cortex—the logical and rational part of our brain—is less active. In contrast, the amygdala and hippocampus, which are responsible for memory and emotion, become more active during this time.

The combination of a less active prefrontal cortex with a more active amygdala and hippocampus promotes problem-solving without constraints, enabling free association and metaphorical thinking. This often leads to highly imaginative dream content and creative insights. Many renowned figures across various fields, including Albert Einstein, Gandhi, Paul McCartney, Salvador Dalí, and Jack Nicklaus, have credited their professional breakthroughs to insights gained directly from their dreams. Some of them even developed specific methods to tap into this creativity through waking dreams.

Dreaming and waking are integral parts of consciousness that are profoundly intertwined. Besides waking life problems, disturbing life events that evoke strong emotions often manifest in our dreams. During the COVID-19 Pandemic, many people experienced widespread fear, anxiety, anger, frustration, and social isolation, leading to a significant increase in disturbing dreams worldwide. This phenomenon has also been observed during other significant historical challenges, such as the Holocaust. Understanding the strong connection between waking life and dreams is crucial for effectively engaging with our dreams to regulate emotions and enhance our mental health and overall well-being.

I grew up in China and immigrated to the U.S. when I was a teenager, where I studied finance and worked in investment banking. Both of my parents experienced trauma as children in the post-war era and were busy working all the time when I grew up. Due to my detached upbringing, relationship loss from immigration, and working in an analytical and competitive environment, I struggled to access and express my emotions and was often unaware of other people’s feelings.

In my thirties, around the time I first became a mother, I had some vivid and impactful dreams that changed me. In 2019, just before the pandemic, I wrote and published a memoir titled Navigate Life with Dreams based on these dreams. It explored how my dreams helped me unpack long-forgotten emotions from early life experiences, which helped me develop empathy and feel more connected to my family, community, nature, and the larger world.

Everyone has had big dreams that are hard to forget. They contain important insights regarding our deepest desires and true purpose. Unfortunately, most people don’t know how to interpret dreams and what to do with them. Gradually, they forget all their dreams upon waking, losing touch with their dreaming self – the innermost soulful aspect of their being, and lose sight of their life’s journey and its purpose. Deliberate waking dream practices can reconnect us with our dreams, emotions, and spiritual mission.

Modern dreamwork recognizes that dreams are meaningful representations of the dreamer’s life and that the dreamers hold the ultimate authority over the meaning of their dreams. Through practices such as dream journaling, dream sharing, and dream interpretation, people can make sense of their dreams to gain self-awareness and access creative insights for addressing waking life issues.

Through the use of visualization techniques, individuals can immerse themselves in their dreams or explore the dream worlds of others while awake, experiencing the dreamscape through embodied cognition. Several renowned psychologists, including Carl Jung, Mary Watkins, Stanley Krippner, Deirdre Barrett,  Kelly Bulkeley, and Evan Thompson, advocate for the importance of engaging with dream imageries while awake for therapeutic and problem-solving purposes.

The waking dream journey into the subconscious can be facilitated by a variety of both ancient and contemporary practices. Among these are hypnosis, which can unlock hidden memories and alter conscious awareness; meditation, offering tranquillity and focus; lucid dreaming, where one becomes aware during dreams, and dream yoga, a practice that encourages awareness and control within dreams.

Other methods include yoga nidra, a state of conscious sleep that fosters deep relaxation and insight; vision quests, which involve personal exploration in nature; and active imagination, a technique to engage with the unconscious mind. Additionally, the rhythmic beat of shamanic drumming and the expressive movements of ceremonial dancing deepen the connection to dreamlike states. The use of hallucinogenics, too, can open doors to altered perceptions and experiences, enriching the exploration of the inner landscape. Together, these waking dream practices offer a profound way to delve into the realms of dreams and consciousness.

Cultural interpretations of waking dreams can vary significantly between Western societies and indigenous cultures, reflecting broad differences in beliefs, spirituality, and understandings of mental health. In Western contexts, waking dreams are often labelled as hallucinations and viewed through a clinical lens. They are commonly associated with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, severe depression, or substance abuse. Western medical paradigms tend to pathologize deviations from typical perceptions. This dominant worldview often adopts a materialistic understanding of reality, viewing waking dreams as abnormalities in brain function rather than trauma responses or spiritual experiences.

On the contrary, many indigenous cultures around the world view waking dreams as spiritual or transcendent experiences that are essential for understanding both the self and the world around us. These experiences often serve as a means to connect with ancestors, spirits, or the divine and are integral to healing and growth. Within these traditions, the waking dream trance can provide insights that guide individuals and communities to overcome their challenges and navigate their paths forward.

This cultural perspective sharply contrasts Western biases, which often prioritize rationality and quantitative evidence. As a result, rich, subjective experiences are frequently diminished and seen merely as neurological anomalies. Such biases can marginalize people who have waking dream experiences, treating them as abnormal while ignoring their potential significance in broader existential or spiritual contexts.

By examining waking dreams through a more inclusive perspective, we can appreciate the diversity of human experiences. Recognizing that these states of consciousness serve varied purposes across different cultures, we can foster a more holistic understanding of these phenomena. This approach invites a more balanced view of mental health and wellbeing, bridging the gap between pathology and the profound complexities of human experience.

Over the past three years, I have developed a mental wellness practice called Guided Dreaming. This practice is inspired by my octopus waking dreams, and it combines elements of dream science, psychology, and dreamwork. Through breathwork and visualization, I guide participants into a serene underwater dreamscape while they are awake. In this safe and serene space, they interact with my octopus dream friend, experiencing deep relaxation and releasing tension and stress. They also learn mental shapeshifting, a critical skill for regulating emotions and solving problems under pressure.

During the Guided Dreaming process, participants encounter unique dream symbols that reflect their personal life experiences and are invited to bring a problem and a helper. After the guided experience, I facilitate dream-sharing to help each person interpret their dreams and gain insights and solutions to their challenges.

Two years ago, I returned to school to pursue my second master’s degree in health psychology and conducted eleven mixed-method case studies of Guided Dreaming participants for my thesis research. This research revealed that most people, regardless of background and experiences, are indeed capable of experiencing waking dreams that yield transformative insights to help them confront life’s obstacles.

The eleven study participants come from diverse backgrounds in terms of gender, age, ethnicity, education, religion, and relationships. Their experience with mindfulness activities varies, ranging from frequent practice to rare engagement. They brought a wide array of problems into their waking dreams, including issues related to career, health, spousal relationships, grief, business, and spiritual development. For support, they chose trusted loved ones and animal companions.

All eleven participants experienced unique waking dreams characterized by vivid sensations and positive emotions during a single session. Ninety-one percent found Guided Dreaming effective in reducing stress and generating valuable problem-solving insights. On average, their mental outlook improved by 36%. I presented these findings at a recent conference of the International Association of Analytical Psychology (IAAP) in October 2024.

The waking dreams facilitated a transformative process that deepened the participants’ awareness of the challenges they faced, offered new perspectives, and increased their confidence in navigating and overcoming these obstacles. Although their challenges remained unchanged, they developed a clearer understanding of their situations, a sense of support, and strategies for addressing their issues. One participant who experienced Guided Dreaming remarked, “Guided Dreaming is just as relevant as sleep dreaming, but it may be even more beneficial because the details are easier to recall while awake.”

Through my research and practice, I strive to raise awareness of the transformative benefits of waking dreams and to dispel the stigma surrounding them. Recognizing the significance of these experiences liberates us to explore our consciousness, allowing us to integrate valuable insights from waking dreams into our daily lives for holistic well-being. This journey enables us to reconnect with our emotional and spiritual selves, enriching our understanding of who we are and our profound interconnectedness.