Translator: Midori T Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
Have any of you ever dreamt on purpose,
tried to dream about something,
or maybe solved a problem in your sleep?
If you have, you are in very good company,
with the likes of Dmitri Mendeleev, creator of the periodic table of elements;
with Mary Shelley, the author of "Frankenstein";
Otto Loewi, Nobel Prize winner;
C.J. Walker, the first American female millionaire;
Federico Fellini, Italian filmmaker;
and Abraham Lincoln.
All of these people made life-changing discoveries in their dreams,
and you do, too, every night.
Maybe you just don't remember.
So my big message for you today
is that dreaming is essential to our creativity and to our health.
It's a fundamental part of being human.
Every night, whether you remember or not, you have four to six dreams.
Here's what that looks like:
the purple boxes are dreams.
And you'll notice the first dream of the night tends to be very short;
that's filled with a lot of what we call day residue.
It'll be almost a replay of an emotionally significant moment during the day.
As the night goes on,
the dreams start to pull images, experiences, emotions
from earlier and earlier in the life span,
until we get to the last dream of the night,
which is the longest and oftentimes the most bizarre.
I like to think of it as our dreaming self is like an artist,
just cutting and pasting and collaging it all together
to come up with really unique visual and emotional idioms.
So what would it be like if you could dream on purpose?
Actually, people throughout the world have already figured out how to do this.
In many cultures, there are different rituals for dreaming on purpose,
and you can find this throughout history.
So, let's take a look at Ancient Greece for a moment.
Some of you may recognize this symbol:
it's the Rod of Asclepius.
This is also used as a symbol mark for the World Health Organization.
Asclepius was a god of dreams and healing,
and throughout the ancient world, there were temples devoted to him -
where people would come and dream and ask the god for help in their sleep,
and they expected fully that he would come and heal them.
He also had a lot of kids, and I think you know some of them.
For example, Hygieia - she went on to become hygiene,
Panacea who became healing, Meditrine became medicine,
and Iaso was the goddess of recuperation from an illness.
Today we can still see Asclepius's influence in the medical system
every time you visit a clinic.
The word for clinic, by the way, comes from the Greek word "kline,"
which is the bench that people used to lie down on in an Asclepian temple
to dream and wait for the god to come heal them.
So even if you don't remember your dreams,
they're still happening, and they're still supporting you.
They're a powerful ally.
So, what do scientists think about dreaming?
What function do dreams serve? Why do we dream?
Well, there's a lot of opinions,
but there's a few things that they agree on.
And that is that the dreaming brain is incredibly active,
as active, if not more so, than the waking brain.
And also that dreaming is our most emotional state of consciousness,
so while it may not be rationally coherent,
it is emotionally coherent.
And in the absence of four to six dreams per night,
it's impossible to maintain emotional balance.
Ask any mom of a newborn - she will verify this.
(Laughter)
Dreams are also where that learning we do during the day
is consolidated and woven together with past experiences,
so what we learned today that's emotionally relevant
can become useful in the future.
So we can practice a lot during the day,
we can do all kinds of things during the day,
but unless we get four to six cycles of dreaming at night,
we're not going to be able to retain that learning.
So how do you dream on purpose?
The first thing is treasure your sleep,
really value the gift that it is and don't compromise on it.
Then, pick something you're working on, during the day already,
that's really important to you, that's emotionally meaningful.
For example, maybe there's a project you're working on,
or perhaps there's a relationship that's going through a bit of trouble,
or you have a health issue.
Push to the limits;
you can't expect the dreaming to do all the work for you,
but really push it,
and then allow yourself to get stuck.
Go until you hit a wall,
and that is the perfect time to ask the dreaming for support.
Then, create an incubation phrase.
So, because dreaming is also one of our most visual states of consciousness,
I like to start with the phrase "Show me."
For example,
"Show me what the next step in my project looks like,"
"Show me what good health feels like,"
"Show me what's getting in the way of this being a great relationship."
Then go to sleep and dream.
Now, as you're starting to fall asleep,
you'll notice your body starts to feel warm and heavy,
and you may have noticed the little jerks.
Has anybody ever noticed that? Yeah.
That's when you're shifting states of consciousness
from waking consciousness into what we call the hypnagogic state,
this delicious threshold between waking and dreaming.
And that's a great time to start reciting your phrase to yourself:
"Show me the next step,"
"Show me what health feels like,"
"Show me what's getting in my way."
Now remember, the dreams are going to answer in their own language,
and that language is going to be highly emotional,
it's going to be very filled with imagination and a lot of images,
but just welcome it like you would any new friend.
Don't try to translate it or pin it down to some kind of meaning.
Instead, start a conversation.
Just allow yourself to be in a place of appreciation and wonder,
and let the dreams come as they are.
Speak as they do; start a dialog,
just like Paul McCartney, who woke up with this lovely melody,
but he couldn't get it out of his head
and was sure he must have heard it somewhere
because it was so fully realized.
So he put a little working title on it. He called it "Scrambled Eggs."
And then, according to his biography, he went around the music business,
asking people, "Have you ever heard this before?"
because he didn't want to unconsciously plagiarize somebody else's work.
Well, after a few weeks of doing this, nobody said they had heard it before,
and he decided, "Okay, it must be mine."
So, he sat down and wrote the lyrics, which became "Yesterday,"
one of the most recorded songs in the music business.
So, what if you could dream tonight on purpose?
What would you dream about? What are you already working on?
What health issues are there?
Is there something you'd like support for?
First thing to do is form your phrase and then sleep well.
Try to wake naturally, without an alarm clock,
because if you can,
you will wake naturally from that last dream of the night.
And when you do, keep your body very still,
because body position affects memory.
Now you only have two to five minutes of short-term recall
to get this dream down.
So, don't worry if it doesn't make sense; just stay with it.
I like Stephen King's advice -
he is another author who regularly draws upon his dreams.
He says to limit sensory input.
So, what I do to stay in touch with the internal world of dreams
is I put in a pair of earplugs that I always have next to my bed,
I put a cloth over my eyes,
and then I hover in the hypnopompic state -
the state when we're coming out of the dreams into waking.
Now, after I have gotten a sense of what the dream is about - remember it -
then I turn over very carefully
and start to write in my journal.
At this point, focus on description.
Don't worry if it makes any sense or not,
because remember, you've only got two to five minutes.
Just describe.
Just like Larry Page, who woke up in the middle of the night
with this bizarre dream about being able to download the entire Internet
into his computers that he had.
Well, he stayed with the images;
he started to write a lot of associations, ideas that were flowing from that;
and the next thing you know, he's got the idea for what became Google.
So, take time after you've written your dream to reflect upon it,
and as you're in the luscious state of just waking up and savoring it,
if any associations come up, any feelings, just put them down,
but don't try to pin it down to meaning yet.
Enjoy the images as they are,
just like Einstein,
who woke up with this wonderful experience of having ridden on a beam of light.
He stayed with that,
and that eventually became the seed that grew into the theory of relativity.
Now, after you've woken from your dreams and you've written something down,
or even if you haven't remembered them,
express gratitude,
because whether you remember your dreams or not,
they're still supporting your learning,
your balancing of emotions,
your health, your creativity.
They're always working on your behalf.
Now, take a moment upon waking to look back in your journal
and pick maybe one image to savor throughout the day,
just enjoy it,
just like Elias Howe, who had an incredible nightmare.
Now, sometimes nightmares can actually be really useful.
He had this nightmare of being chased.
How many of you have ever been chased in a dream?
Right? It's the number one most common dream.
So, he was being chased by a group of cannibals through the jungle -
can you imagine that? -
and they caught him, and they were tying him up,
and he was getting ready to be cooked, and it was just terrifying.
And at that point, they came at him with a spear,
and they went right up to his face.
Well, they didn't kill him. He was really surprised.
He was looking at the spear,
and in front of him was a spear tip that had a hole in it.
What a strange image.
Carried that into the day, and as he's mulling it over,
he realized, "Aha!
That's what I need to do to create a sewing machine."
Up until then, needles had always had the thread coming in at the top there,
and that when you try to put that in machine,
then it would trap the thread and it couldn't move,
but if you were to move the hole down to the tip of the needle,
just like those spears,
then it could hold the needle in a sewing machine, and the thread could move.
That was the invention of the sewing machine.
Now, today is 3/11.
I don't know if any of you realize what that means.
We all know what 9/11 is.
My other home is in Japan.
March 11 was a day that the great tsunami and earthquake took place in Japan.
Today is the anniversary.
And I'd like to share a very personal story with you
about dreaming on purpose in community, and what that can do for healing.
So, a year after the great earthquake,
I received an invitation
to go up into the disaster zone and meet with a group of women.
They wanted to dream about, How can we move forward after such an event?
So, the first thing we did was get together and share stories,
and we all talked about, Where were we during the earthquake?
Who did we know? What happened during the great tsunami?
And then we went to a place called Ishinomaki,
and I know that many of you know about Ishinomaki
because you watched it wash away,
that whole town that went off into the ocean.
At the edge of that district is a hill.
And on top of that hill, is a - was a small Shinto shrine,
and one lone tree survived when nothing else did.
So, we went up there to look over that whole scene
and to give thanks that we were alive
and to pray for the souls of those who had passed.
Then we went back to the inn,
and we put out our futon bedding to lie down and sleep
and dream together
about how to move forward after such an event.
That night, one of the women dreamed that she was in a stadium,
and she was in front of a crowd,
deciding who should stay and who should go.
She was very good at her job. She didn't have any emotion about it.
But when she woke up,
she was overcome with grief and guilt about having survived.
The next woman dreamt that she was at home alone in her house,
and that it was so filthy dirty,
and she was just incredibly tired.
It was overwhelming, and she didn't know where to begin to start cleaning up.
The next woman dreamt that she was in the foundation of a house.
Only the foundation and the bare walls remained,
and in those walls were etched the black and white portraits
of the children that had been washed out to sea.
But at the bottom of the wall, in the bottom-right corner,
was a red portrait of one girl,
and she knew that girl was still alive.
So, the next morning, we shared the dreams with each other.
We shared the feelings that they evoked, and we shared our associations.
And to our surprise, there was an incredible message of hope there,
and this is the message that the women found:
that none of us chose to be survivors
anymore than those who left chose to die that way,
there's no reason to feel guilty about that -
it's just the way things are;
that the mess cleaning it up is going to take a long time,
and the way to do that is to first start taking care of ourselves,
to get enough rest, and that's okay.
And finally, those who have passed are never going to be forgotten;
they are etched into the very walls of our being.
It's time to focus on those who are alive.
So, in closing, I'd like to remind you that dreaming is essential to our health,
to our creativity, to our communities.
And I'd like you to also know that by the time you're 80,
you will have spent almost 20 years in the dream world.
Can you imagine living 20 years abroad
and having no recollection of the experience?
(Laughter)
So, I'd like to invite you all to go home tonight and dream on purpose.
Thank you.
(Applause)