Principle 2 - Value your dreams
Fortunately dreams do their work whether we may attention to them or not. However, if we value our dreams, and work with them, we can gain great insight into our own emotional well-being.
Value Your Dreams
We live in a world that values results, data, and waking consciousness. Yet we spend nearly a third of our lives asleep—and close to 20% of that time dreaming. For most of us, dreams happen in silence, unnoticed, unexplored, and often forgotten before the sun rises.
But ignoring dreams does not mean they stop working. Like the heart that beats without our attention, dreams continue their vital function in the background of our lives, shaping our emotional health, memory consolidation, and creative thinking. Still, just as we benefit when we pay attention to our heart health, we are rewarded with greater emotional vitality, insight, and resilience when we choose to value our dreams.
Everyone Dreams—Every Night
The idea that “I don’t dream” is a myth. Everyone dreams. Every single night. Most people have at least 90–120 minutes of REM sleep during an average night, spread across four to six sleep cycles. The deepest REM-rich cycles often occur in the final third of the night, making full sleep essential for robust dreaming.
Unfortunately, many people cut their nights short due to early alarms, stress, or lifestyle demands. When you do that, you are disproportionately cutting out REM sleep—the stage when most vivid, emotionally rich, and psychologically significant dreams occur. Regularly shortening your sleep is not just harmful to your body—it’s a silent theft of your inner life.
As we explored in the previous chapter, protecting your sleep is the first step in valuing your dreams. There is no access to the deep wisdom of dreams without a consistent, protected space in which they can unfold.
The Ancient Connection Between Dreams and Health
In the Hebrew Scriptures, the word often translated as dream can also be translated as health. This linguistic overlap is more than coincidence—it reflects a deeply intuitive and spiritual understanding that dreaming and healing are interwoven. Across traditions and time, dreams have served as oracles, healers, warning signs, and guides. We now know from neuroscience that this was more than mythology—it was insight.
Dreams are not evolutionary leftovers. They are essential neurological events that play a critical role in:
Recalibrating emotions
Preparing the brain for future interactions
Integrating powerful experiences
Enhancing decision-making
Fostering creativity and problem-solving
As Matthew Walker writes in Why We Sleep, “Dreaming provides a form of overnight therapy.” REM sleep, and the dreams it hosts, help us process emotional experiences without the full physiological stress response that often accompanies them while awake. We literally "sleep on it"—and are better for it.
From White Noise to Inner Wisdom
Years ago, I moved into a house in Southern California where I was abruptly awakened at 3:23 a.m. by a terrible noise under the house. It sounded like pipes were exploding. In time, I realized it was just the sprinkler system activating, rattling the old plumbing. A few nights later, I didn’t even notice it. My brain had dismissed it as unimportant.
Years later, while awake at that same time, I heard it again and thought: It’s still happening! I had completely tuned it out.
This is how our culture treats dreams. We’ve relegated them to the status of “banging pipes”—odd, unpredictable, and irrelevant. But dreams never stopped working. We just stopped listening.
Much of Western thought has dismissed dreams as random neurological byproducts—a view rooted in outdated evolutionary models. But this is changing. Recent research in neuroscience, psychology, and cultural studies is restoring dreams to their rightful place as critical tools for emotional and psychological health.
The Four Postures Toward Dreams
We relate to our dreams with varying degrees of awareness and engagement. Most people live in one of four postures:
Curious: “You wouldn’t believe the dream I had last night.”
Interested: “I wonder what that dream meant?”
Attentive: “I had this dream that was really important.”
Engaged: “My dreams regularly guide me through confusion toward health and vitality.”
DreamWork invites us toward this final posture—not simply decoding dreams for meaning, but welcoming them as wise companions in our journey of growth.
Changing the Cultural Narrative
To value your dreams is to challenge the cultural misrepresentation that they are meaningless. It is to reclaim your nighttime life as fertile, creative, and essential.
Dreams are:
The native language of the visual cortex
A built-in system for emotional regulation
A rehearsal ground for future social and emotional scenarios
A sorting mechanism for emotionally weighted memories
A compass for strategic planning, creativity, and insight
A gift from God to guide, protect, and awaken us
Ignoring your dreams doesn’t silence their wisdom—it just means you’re not hearing it.
A Heartbeat of the Soul
Think of your dreams like your heart: you don’t need to be aware of your heartbeat for it to keep you alive. But by becoming aware—through exercise, diet, and attention—you can strengthen its health and resilience. Likewise, your dreams will do their quiet work whether you notice or not. But when you choose to listen, respond, and engage, they offer you a greater degree of psychological and spiritual vitality.
Expressing Gratitude for Dreams
Gratitude is a powerful practice in DreamWork. Each night, your mind engages in deep, invisible labor—reconciling memories, integrating stress, forecasting emotional terrain, and sometimes offering symbolic guidance. Begin to thank your dreams, even if you don’t yet understand them.
Thank them for working on your behalf.
Entrust them with your emotions and confusion.
Give them your dilemmas before sleep.
Thank them for waking you up to what you’ve been ignoring.
Appreciate the way they prepare you for tomorrow.
When you express gratitude for your dreams, you signal to your unconscious that you are ready to listen. That posture alone can increase dream recall and deepen your engagement.
Valuing Dreams Is a Choice
The cultural tide is shifting. Neuroscience, spirituality, and lived experience are converging to confirm what ancient traditions always knew: Dreams matter. They are not nonsense. They are not noise. They are not random.
They are a natural healing system, built into the architecture of human life.
To value your dreams is not just to analyze them. It is to live in a deeper relationship with your own inner life—and with the Source who speaks there.
References
Walker, M. (2017). Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. Scribner.
Barrett, D. (2001). The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Dreams for Creative Problem Solving. Oneiroi Press.
Nielsen, T., & Levin, R. (2007). Nightmares: A new neurocognitive model. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 11(4), 295–310.
Domhoff, G. W. (2003). The Scientific Study of Dreams: Neural Networks, Cognitive Development, and Content Analysis. APA Press.
Revonsuo, A. (2000). The reinterpretation of dreams: An evolutionary hypothesis of the function of dreaming. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(6), 877–901.
Stickgold, R., & Walker, M. P. (2013). Sleep-dependent memory triage: Evolving generalization through selective processing. Nature Neuroscience, 16(2), 139–145.
