"Recurring Dreams: What They Mean and How to Break the Cycle"

April 11, 1865. President Abraham Lincoln feels downcast as he speaks with his friend and bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon. He tells Lamon he's highly anxious about a dream he had the other night, in which he'd seen a corpse lying atop a catafalque in the White House's East Room as "the subdued sobs of mourners" filled his ears. When he asked a soldier who it was, he replied, "The President. An assassin killed him." A few days later, while watching the play "Our American Cousin," Lincoln was shot by an assassin at Ford's theater. He died the next day.

Today we will take you down the rabbit hole of the meaning of dreams, an age-old problem we intend to get to the bottom of. We need to start with a few real-life cases of people who had recurring dreams, and there’s no better place to start than Lincoln, a man who was obsessed with his dream life. He wasn’t shy about telling others about it, even though his arguably superstitious fascination might have seemed below a man of such high intellectual standing. One recurring dream he told his cabinet about happened many times during the Civil War. He said he often dreamed he was on a “singular and indescribable vessel that was rushing toward a dark and indefinite shore.” He said he had this dream before “nearly every great and important event of the war.” This included some of the Union’s most significant victories, such as Gettysburg and Antietam. It meant substantial changes were afoot for him, but as you’ll soon see, modern psychologists may have disagreed. It might sound unbelievable to us in 2023 that the President of the USA would tell his cabinet about his dream life, but in those days, people were fascinated by dreams. Sometimes a well-known person’s dreams would appear in newspapers, as did Lincoln’s many times. It was thought back then that dreams might be able to unlock doors to the future. That they might be warnings, messages about what’s going to happen. Lincoln was one of those people that often remembered his dreams.

We all dream, maybe four to six dreams a night if our brains are in working order and we are not on certain drugs that can affect our sleeping patterns. They usually last ten to twenty minutes, but dreams can feel much longer because we don’t use our logical faculties when dreaming. That’s one theory. Another says it’s related to the sleeping brain being at a lower temperature. We are also effectively paralyzed in sleep, which is good since we can’t act out what’s going on in the dreams with our muscles. Some people wake up but remain paralyzed, a condition known as sleep paralysis, which can be scary as hell as you scream and shout and try and move your arms while you can still hear the person next to you snoring. If you’ve experienced it, you’ll know what we mean when we say it’s frightening. There are four stages of sleep, taking about 90 minutes a cycle. We have the most vivid dreams during the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) part of the cycle. The REM stage gets longer the further we are into our night’s sleep. REM’s relation to dreaming was only really defined in 1953, long before Lincoln went on his trips down the river.

The dreams we remember are the ones we have just before waking. Still, even if we remember them in vivid detail at first, because of certain neurochemical conditions scientists don't always agree on, we forget them throughout the day. But the big ones can stay with us forever. Lincoln used to write his dreams down after waking, which, as you'll see later in this show, was an excellent idea. Lincoln wasn't the only one who thought his dreams were more like visions of the future. Dreams have been seen as prophesies since time began. Alexander Hamilton Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederacy throughout the Civil War, said the same thing as Lincoln. He said he also saw the future during his nightly bouts of Zzzs. While in prison at Fort Warren at the war's end, he said he had several recurring dreams and wrote them all down. He said he'd often wake up in tears after dreaming about being at home and expressing goodbye to his slaves or visiting his deceased sister. He wrote, "For the most part, my dreams seem nothing but the aberrations of my mind…Still, they seemed to be so much more…special visitations…visits portending something." He believed God might somehow be part of these dreams. So, here we had two men of high intellectual caliber living in an age of rationality and reason, fighting on two different sides, who both believed dreams could be portents (a picture of the future). As we said, these prophecies were published by newspapers. The public lapped the stories up. Many people thought Lincoln's "The Janus-Faced Vision" dream was him seeing his demise. He had the dream just after he'd been elected in 1860. He said he was looking into a looking glass, but what looked back at him were two faces, one much paler than the other. Lincoln told his wife, Mary, about this, and he also said several close friends. After his assassination, this dream, the floating dream, and the White House funeral dream were printed in various newspapers. One story said that after he told Mary about the two-faced dream, she said, "That means you will be reelected - but I don't like it's looking pale…that looks as if you would not live through your second term." Lincoln was super spooked by this dream, thinking it could mean he'd be a dead man during his second term. He died after just 45 days into that second term. He was so unnerved about this dream he tried to tell himself it was "the natural result of some principle of refraction or optics." We told you he was a very rational man. Some might now think Lincoln was crazy, but maybe his dreams taught him something, as we will explain soon. We can find many more stories of people who felt their dreams were a warning. There's the story told by the satirist Mark Twain, who said he had a dream of his brother's death. At the time, Twain, real name Samuel Clemens, was 23. He had a dream his brother was dead and was so convinced that he had to be calmed down by his sister. At the time, both brothers worked on a steamboat called Pennsylvania. To cut a long story short, he and his brother split up. Pennsylvania sank, and the brother died on it, along with 250 others. Later the scene at the funeral was exactly what young Twain (Samuel) had dreamed of. It is no surprise that he later joined the Society for Psychical Research. Twain was a very sharp and intelligent man, but he believed dreams held a mysterious power. He once wrote, "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together; they must go out together.' He died one day after Halley's Comet's perihelion.

Twas an excellent guess he made! Dr. James Watson said before he wrote about the double helix structure of DNA, he had dreams about a double-sided staircase of, in some accounts, two intertwined serpents. Paul McCartney dreamed up the song “Yesterday” and wrote it when he woke. Dimitry Mendeleev, who created the modern periodic table in the 19th century, once wrote, “I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.” Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, said he used to have the same dream over and over in which he was in a giant house with many floors and rooms, which he later realized were different parts of the psyche. Still today, we often fill in personality archetypes tests for fun or in the interview process for a job.

Jung worked closely with Sigmund Freud until the two had a famous falling out. These two became widely known for trying to explain dreams from a psychological point of view, not a neurobiological point of view. They didn’t believe in dreams as messages from God or other forms of divination. For them, dreams were firmly rooted in the person and could tell you a lot about that person. While they differed significantly regarding their thoughts about the mind, they understood that dreams were powerful. Freud thought more about how dreams were manifestations of repressed desires and unconscious conflicts, while Jung once said, “They do not deceive, they do not lie, they do not distort or disguise.” He said dreams could be linked with archetypes and universal themes and show us the purpose of our lives. So, for Jung, dreams may indicate a path forward, a development. Still, he also said, “I have noticed that dreams are as simple or as complicated as the dreamer is himself, only they are always a little ahead of the dreamer’s consciousness. I do not understand my dreams better than you, for they are always somewhat beyond my grasp.”

For Freud, who, to be frank, was quite dark, a recurring dream would be a reenactment of something traumatic that had happened to someone in the past. The dream might be the only way this person can awaken these dark forces. He also believed dreams were a way to release repressed sexual desire. So, if he’d read that Lincoln had dreamed of a “singular and indescribable vessel that was moving with great rapidity toward a dark and indefinite shore,” he would no doubt have said the vessel was Lincoln’s penis and the dark and indefinite shore was his repressed sexual desires. Jung might have said what many of you would think: Lincoln’s vessel was his unconscious mind on an adventure to attain personal growth. But there’s much more to dreaming that these two guys came up with.

So, right now, we have discussed three types of recurring dreams. One is the dream as possibly a warning, as you saw, very popular in Lincoln’s day and, although we didn’t discuss it, famous throughout most of history.

Type two is a dream as being part of creative inspiration. What ancients might have said was being touched by the Gods. Type three is the dream as a symbol, a coded message that can tell us something more profound about ourselves. This is how we usually think of recurring dreams in this day and age. What’s strange is that people tend to have the same goals. According to the Sleep Foundation, between 60% and 75% of American adults have recurring dreams, with women having them more often than men. 77% of those recurring dreams are negative, with car crashes and your teeth falling out being common. Other common recurring dreams are being chased, falling, flying, being naked in public, and finding yourself unprepared for something important, such as having an exam or public speaking.

Let’s look at the dream of teeth falling out; not a very nice dream. It goes without saying that if your teeth are falling out in real life, then this anxiety would be expected, but most people with this dream usually have perfect teeth. So, it doesn’t fall into what we call the continuity hypothesis, which means dreams just being an extension of our waking thoughts or worries. Losing teeth in a dream, often just pulling them out easily with your fingers, seems to go a lot deeper than dental hygiene concerns. The ancient Greek dream interpreter Artemidorus Daldianus said different teeth could represent different people in a household, so losing teeth could mean fearing someone’s death. He also wrote, “It is quite reasonable that some of the teeth when they fall out, signify the loss of…possessions.” That was almost two thousand years ago, and things haven’t changed much. We generally relate losing teeth in a dream to insecurity looming over someone. Freud once theorized that losing teeth in dreams was a fear of sexual impotence, possibly a fear of castration for men, and a fear of infertility for women. He said this was all related to the fear of powerlessness, and for Freud, the greatest of all insecurities was losing your genitals. Some more recent studies have confirmed that people who dreamed about losing their teeth often suffer from higher levels of depression and anxiety and, in real life, are worried a lot about feeling helpless and losing control. They were stuck in a loop of anxiety and depression, so their bad dreams recurred. Researchers also said this dream is common when people face life transitions. Some other studies related such dreams to actual tooth irritation, such as teeth grinding when people sleep, but that’s a long shot. Some dreams are straightforward to understand. Many people dream of being unable to find a bathroom, then wake up and find they need a pee. Other dreams, such as trying to turn on a light in a dream, are far less easily understood. It would seem pretty obvious in the symbolic sense that the dream would mean someone needs some clarity in life, an answer to a question. Perhaps they’ve found themselves in a difficult situation in life but can’t find a way out and so need some light. This again relates to the feeling of being anxious and powerless. But why is any of this happening at all? What makes us dream of these things? It’s not as if we go to bed wanting these dreams to happen. Some dreams are just us seemingly mixing and mashing up parts of our day. A movie, for instance, can affect what we dream at night, but sometimes we have the trips of a lifetime, and the content of the dream doesn’t seem to relate to anything you can easily explain. We can become epic movie producers, yet the movies aren’t based on our day-to-day lives. Why? We know from looking at brain activity that the limbic system is very active during sleep. The limbic system plays a huge part in processing our emotions, motivations, and memories. The amygdala is also part of this system, and during REM – remember the dreamy part of our sleep cycle – the amygdala, which processes fear and anxiety, is very active. Meanwhile, the part of the brain that is not very active is the reasoning and logical thinking part, the prefrontal cortex. It’s like watching a movie without a director, just lots of wild memories and feelings. You have this big bag of memories, fears, and emotions all swirling around, but your so-called “executive suite” is hardly switched on. That’s why your dreams are so unbelievable; they can defy logic. It’s thought that when people have lucid dreams when they know they are dreaming and can impact the outcome of their dreams, some part or parts of the frontal cortex are turned on. But again, why are our brains doing this to us? Why did evolution make us this way? Dreams have been with us forever and are here to stay, but why? Our brains are certainly mysterious things. We have stored much on these hard drives in our heads that we’re not always aware of. These hidden memories, symbols, and feelings can sometimes come out when we’re not exactly dreaming, and we think this might be an answer to why we dream or have recurring dreams. Researchers from the Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London wrote a paper in 2019 about the effect of dimethyltryptamine (DMT) on humans. DMT is a potent, sometimes life-changing hallucinogen, something Joe Rogan likes to talk about. He’s not alone. The researchers wrote: “From the altered brainwaves and participants’ reports, it’s clear these people are completely immersed in their experience — it’s like daydreaming only far more vivid and immersive; it’s like dreaming but with your eyes open.” People on DMT, especially long exposure doses after taking a South American ritualistic concoction known as ayahuasca, have reported going on journeys and finding solutions to problems – sometimes overcoming life-long depression or PTSD. Johns Hopkins in the USA is doing similar experiments in a lab with psilocybin (magic mushrooms).

Their early reports show incredibly positive results in helping people with chronic mental issues. A report noted, “Scientists believe that psilocybin mushrooms place people into a ‘waking’ dream state. This is because these mushrooms create brain states that usually only occur when a person is sleeping. Analyzing the biological similarities and differences of psilocybin use…opens the doors for using psilocybin mushrooms as a therapy for diseases like depression and anxiety.” This might explain what our dreams are there for. Maybe they are our brain’s way of assessing our problems, such as anxiety issues, an exam, or the threat of being dumped or losing a job. This anxiety plays out in stories like people having colorful dreams on DMT or psilocybin. The researchers call these waking dreams on those substances mystical experiences, and our dreams could also be said to be paranormal experiences. Months after one of the psilocybin studies, 80 percent of participants who experienced these dreams said they were among the five most “personally meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of their lives.” Fifty percent said it was the single most personally and spiritually meaningful experience. They were all basically dreaming while awake. Now it seems we’re going back to the days of the ancient Greeks and Lincoln, feeling dreams hold a much higher power than simply being manifestations of a movie we watched last night or, as Freud thought, all related to our repressed carnality. It’s more likely that Gods are not in our heads, and we do not see the future when we dream, but our limbic systems are throwing up memories and anxieties that mean something if we analyze what happened. It’s no wonder Lincoln feared his assassination. He knew people wanted him dead. In 1861, he was informed of the so-called Baltimore Plot. It doesn’t matter if there was a real threat or not. He was told there was, which must have played on his mind. Perhaps his dreams just opened him up to his greatest fears. As for why musicians can write songs in dreams or scientists can have a eureka moment while asleep, it seems obvious these things were already on their minds, but their goals opened up new doors in the back of their minds. Of course, there are some beautiful theories regarding our dreams. We love this one from 16th-century China. It’s in riddle form: “Once Chuang Chou dreamed he was a butterfly. He fluttered about happily, quite pleased with the state that he was in, and knew nothing about Chuang Chou. Presently he awoke and found that he was very much Chuang Chou again. Did Chou dream that he was a butterfly, or was the butterfly now dreaming that he was Chou?” It sounds similar to the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis. Is our reality just a dream, and are we merely brains in a vat of nutrients connected to a supercomputer? When we take the Red Pill, can we sometimes break out of his plan, like in The Matrix? Is taking DMT or psilocybin like taking the Red Pill? Ok, so we don’t think there’s a matrix, and we doubt we are brains in vats, but perhaps dreams can show us another reality we can considerably learn from. Studies have shown that most people believe plans can reveal hidden truths. It’s not wild to suggest that, it seems. It’s just that science can’t fully understand dreams. We don’t know how these dreams are organized, especially when they are spectacular trips worthy of a movie screening. All we know is our brains can conjure up amazing things while we are dreaming or having waking dreams on powerful substances - that we should add should not be taken outside of a professional setting until we understand them more. So, it’s possible that, like Lincoln, we have recurring dreams to understand ourselves better and figure out our reality. Sometimes we can’t, so we get stuck in a loop of bad dreams. Scientists have sometimes said that’s what happens with depression; people get stuck in a seemingly eternal loop of the same negative thoughts. It would make sense that our dreams also get stuck in circles, but we are trying to get off this running wheel in the plan. It’s possible that in some goals, we make a breakthrough. We’re sure many of you have woken up from dreams feeling like a weight has been lifted off your back. These could be said to be breakthrough dreams. Scientists admit that dreams can heal; they don’t know why exactly. A British scientist also working on psilocybin studies said the dream-like trips in his studies helped people escape their never-ending cycle of repetitive negative thoughts.

Maybe that’s what dreams are, people running around trying to make sense of things and sometimes trying to find pathways out of trouble. Although, we don’t think there’s anything otherworldly about our dreams. Nonetheless, what we don’t know about ourselves is a somewhat magical and sometimes frightening universe that needs to be explored. Your dreams are your friend, even if it might not seem that way sometimes. Now you need to watch “Near Death Experiences Examined.” Or, check out the meaning of life in “History of the Entire Universe (In 25 Minutes).”