The first thing I learned is: Everybody flies.
Consider the surly taxi driver I met in Ukraine who, when asked what he dreamed of at night, responded, “I jump and then I fly—higher than the trees, higher than the trolley wires.”
“I think when I die,” he mused, “that’s what it’s going to be like.”
As an instructor in psychology at the City College of New York, I teach about the power of the subconscious, whose hidden cognition comprises the vast majority of brain activity. Increasingly, research is confirming that we humans are almost entirely subconscious beings, largely oblivious to the mind’s extensive inner workings. Dreams are one of the few exceptions.
I’ve always had an active dream life (just recently, I sent a herd of buffalo rampaging through a deserted Times Square, and performed psychic surgery on a thousand-chambered heart). Curious whether others had similar experiences, I started the World Dream Atlas project, a Facebook page of dreams gathered on my off hours while traveling as a journalist. Over the last 10 months, I’ve collected dreams from hundreds of people in 17 countries.
In class, I teach from a scientific perspective—everything from Freud’s interpretation of dreams as encrypted “emotional and intellectual trains of thought” to Jie Zhang’s theory of dreams as a byproduct of memory-encoding. Each paradigm is different, but most ignore the innate power of dreams. Dreams are typically regarded as part of a subordinate reality that only becomes significant if it can be translated into something rational. But when dreams are experienced on their own terms, they offer a glimpse of how expansive our minds can be outside the strictures of physical reality. They remind us that some of our most meaningful and transformative experiences are, by nature, irrational. Since most academic research on dreams is generated in the West, I ventured overseas for a fuller understanding of that potential.