Communicating Our Dreams
How to bring worlds into being
“We must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply and so many of our old ideas disparage.” –Audre Lorde
Someone came to me in a dream last night. Someone I know in real life. I’ve been wanting to be closer to them. We grew a stronger connection in that dream, and it felt comforting. They wanted the connection to grow even more, but I knew it wasn’t the right context. When I expressed that, they took it as my wanting to disconnect. Miscommunication happens even in dreams.
When I woke up, I remembered the connection I felt in the dream. I thought to myself, ok, clearly I should reach out to this person today. And then I thought, oh, but maybe that’s not what this dream means, maybe it’s just me playing out my longing for connection in my head.
As I reflected on the dream, I kept wondering, “What does it mean?” All of us ask that question every time we communicate. We try to figure out not only what someone or something means, but we also consider varied interpretations of a message. We get curious about other people and beings. We pay attention to symbols and their ambiguities. These processes are the stuff of communication. Turns out they also apply to our dreams.
Eventually, when I recalled a recent experience, I stopped second guessing myself about the meaning of this particular dream. Several weeks before, I thought of a dear friend who lives across the country from me. I hadn’t talked to her in a few months, and I felt like I should reach out. But then, I got caught up in all the regular bustle of work, and I didn’t send a note. The very next day, I received a text from her: “You were in my dream last night.” We swapped messages a bit and made plans to catch up by phone. I mentioned that I was traveling to a particular city the next week and she said, “Me too! When are you there?!” It turned out that we were arriving on the same day, and our flights were landing at the same airport within hours of each other. She was traveling for a conference, I for dance training. We quickly made plans to meet in person. She greeted me at my gate when I deplaned.
“You won’t believe what my dream was about,” she said. “I dreamt I was at a conference. I saw you there, and I was confused about why you showed up.” I replied, “Wow, dreams are powerful.” I shared that the day before her dream, I’d felt like I should contact her but didn’t and that she’d messaged me the very next day. She said, “Universe be like, ok the first end of this connection isn’t working, let’s try the other end!”
I’ve been working on building a better relationship with a part of myself that thinks it’s silly to build the most fantastical, far-fetched of my dreams in real life. That part of me adds caveats to the adage, “Go after your dreams.” It thinks chasing some dreams is ok, but it filters for the ones that seem reasonable. It likes the ones where there’s a guaranteed possibility of success. It’s more skeptical about the ones that seem to be so filled with joyfulness that they could burst.
But just now, as I took a break from writing to message the person in my dream last night, they started talking to me about a song they’re listening to titled “Call it dreaming.”
I love moments like these where the universe gives you a wink and a nod and makes you believe there’s magic in the world. And for the skeptics, and the skeptical part in me, even if that’s not how it works, what’s the harm in thinking that way if it makes everything glow a bit more?
Rumi has long been one of my favorite poets, and I return to his verse regularly. In “The Dream That Must Be Interpreted,” he says:
This place is a dream.
Only sleepers consider it real.
Then death comes like dawn
and you wake up laughing
at what you thought was your grief.
… though we seem to be sleeping,
there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream,
and that will eventually startle us back
to the truth of who we are.
I so appreciate that inner wakefulness, the wise director within. Whether dreams are sent from the universe, or merely less magical reminders of our own desires, they offer guidance about our hopes and fears, our joys and sorrows.
Dreams can also offer unhelpful delusions. My colleague Dr. Amira de la Garza defines the American Dream as “a fanciful way to make success a magical construct devoid of an awareness of the structural realities that allow for some to ‘make it’ and others not” (p. 11). This type of dreaming erases history. It obscures inequity, and it ignores how systems far bigger than us profoundly shape our lives without our intention or consent. It makes individualism the be-all-end-all. In that American Dreaming, community and good relationships have no place. As Dr. Kim TallBear describes it, the American Dream is really about colonialism, the perfection of a nation-state that depends upon and demands extermination of indigeneity and Blackness. The American Dream supposes (white, cishet) men are created equal, but not everyone else, not all other beings, and certainly not the land. This kind of dreaming hides violence.
For many people, obstacles shut down dreams. As I’ve written about before, rest is unevenly accessible. In some US cities, sleeping in public is criminalized. And when people cannot rest or sleep, it’s hard to dream. Indeed, according to sociologists, our waking dreams—those visions we have about our futures—differ based on our social location and identities. We learn early on to identify what is possible, and that shapes the lives we can imagine for ourselves and our communities.
Even amidst a world that limits some people from actualizing dreams, many of us experience limitless possibilities when we sleep. Sometimes we become aware that we’re sleeping, and then we can play in that dreamland. In that place, you can fly. You can leap and twirl. You can bake cookies with stardust. And sometimes, you commune with other people, some alive, some long gone, some maybe not yet born.
The ability to commune with, in, and through dreams might sound like science fiction, but here are some emerging scientific facts. A recent study showed that two-way communication is possible between someone asleep and someone awake. Cool and spooky, yeah?
In yet more seeming science fiction, some tech bros claim they’ve taken this two-way connection a step further. They demonstrated communication between two sleeping people. Mind you, the report comes from a press release, not a peer-reviewed, scientific study. It describes this scenario: A computer sent a word to one sleeping person, that person repeated the word while sleeping, technology recorded that person expressing the word and then repeated it to a second sleeping person who later recalled the word.
Their process reminds me of the Shannon-Weaver model of communication. It was developed in the 1940s in conjunction with Bell Labs to improve telephones. Because it focuses on the transmission of information, the model conceptualizes messages like packages on a train. It tries to answer the question, “How do we get these metaphorical packages from one place to another?” And that’s exactly the work that the tech folks are doing in their study of dreams—figuring out how to move one bit of info from one sleeping person to the next by relying on a technological intermediary.
In contrast to most theories from my own field of Communication Studies, the Shannon-Weaver model does not explain how people create relationships or make meaning of the world. Shannon and Weaver were not asking, “What does it mean?” Nor were the techies who designed the recent dreamer-to-dreamer connection. Perhaps this focus on information transfer, rather than human connection, is why I can only understand this tech bro achievement as a harbinger of dystopia: They’re excited because people may soon be able to turn on their cybertrucks while they’re still asleep. They’re not considering the profound, untapped potential for people to relate well to one another.
So, when people say, “Go after your dreams!” I appreciate their encouragement, and I also hesitate. I value the power of dreams, but I’d like to relate to my own dreams differently. “Go after your dreams” sounds like a conquest. As if my dreams must be chased because they are not also seeking me. That idea of pursuit organizes a hyper-masculine version of the world, one in which enough ambition, control, striving, and aggression will guarantee that I get what I want. In my world, I enjoy the moments where I want something or someone, and it or they want me right back. Embracing those connections lets me sit in flow, in the clarity of my own desire, and in the trust that what is right for me in my desires will come to me, even and especially when I don’t get what I want. Pursuing and being pursued can be exciting and potent, but it’s not the only way to build relationships to people, places, and to dreams. Rather than chase my dreams, I’d like to welcome them, walk alongside them, dwell with them, be present for them, and believe in them.
Dreams, like other forms of communication, connect us to ourselves and the bigger world. They support us in creating meaning, finding purpose, and living with intention. They nourish our imagination. And as they connect with, support, and nourish us, they also teach us about the multiple words within us and the many worlds we might yet co-create.
Resources and Updates
Interested in more on this topic? Check out these resources.
Anderson, R., & Carr, C. (2023). Afrocentricity and Afrofuturism 2.0: Mapping African futurity in a changing world order. In B. M. Calafell & S. Eguchi (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of ethnicity and race in communication (pp. 207–214). Routledge.
Cerulo, K. A., & Ruane, J. M. (2022). Dreams of a lifetime: How who we are shapes how we imagine our future. Princeton University Press.
Hanchey, J. N. (2021). The dream trainers. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 18(3), 305–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2021.1954212
Navarrete, C. (2012, March 8). Dream, dream, dream: An interview with Amira de la Garza. The State Press.
Stay tuned for the next post, on February 10, 2025, on unlearning self-coercion.
Here at CommuniKate we’ve also got some new things coming up this year. Keep an eye out for some communication-themed playlists and the first ever CommuniKate online workshops. In the meantime, if you’re interested in improving your communication skills, please reach out to me. I’m beta testing my coaching sessions at a heavily discounted rate.
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