I keep returning to something Dr. Dan Siegel said in an interview with Natalie Kuhn:
Physics estimates that 97 percent of what exists is called dark matter and dark energy. Dark, meaning we in our human form cannot tap into it. We can’t sense it. We can’t so far figure out a way to measure it. We don’t understand it. So we live in bodies that allow us, in this form, to make sense of 3 percent of reality.
Three percent.
That’s the slice our senses are built to register. Everything else moves through us and around us, unfelt and unmeasured, while we go on making breakfast.
I don’t find that depressing. I find it enormously relieving.
The filter is doing its job
Siegel says something else in that same conversation: that in order to make sense of sensory experience, we filter — dividing things up into categories and concepts.
That filtering isn’t a flaw. It’s what lets you cross a street, hold a conversation, get a toddler into a car seat. A nervous system that let everything in couldn’t do any of that.
But the filter is set for waking life. It’s calibrated for tasks, for language, for the parts of experience that can be sorted into words.
What happens at night
Dreams run on a different setting.
At night the categories loosen. Time stops behaving. People arrive as two people at once. The dead show up and it isn’t strange. Whatever the day-mind was busy sorting into boxes gets handed back to you unsorted — as image, as sensation, as weather in the body.
I’m not saying dreams give you access to dark matter. That’s not a claim I can make and not one I’m interested in making.
What I am saying is that the aperture opens. Some of what your waking filter screened out comes through at night, and it comes through in a language older than words — the body’s language, which is why so much of a dream is felt before it’s understood.
Dreams widen the three percent.
You’re not retrieving a file. You’re keeping a wider aperture open a little longer.
If you’d like somewhere to put what comes through, the Lunar Dream Map is the wheel I use every morning.