Embodied Dreaming

I've been having fantastic dreams lately. I won't bore you with the details because no one cares much about another person's dream (unless, of course, they themselves show up in it). This is probably because, if you believe those who study dreams, they are largely egocentric wishes, fears, and desires cast in our deepest sleep as stories in which we are the protagonist.

Of course, there are some who believe that dreams are essentially meaningless, the product of our minds' random electrical operations or something. And they may be right, although it's hard, especially when one's dream has been particularly good, bad, or novel to not connect them to the realities of our waking life.

To be honest, I've never really taken my dreams seriously, but I've recently read science journalist David Toomey's book Kingdom of Play in which he writes, "Dreaming . . . (l)ike play and sleep . . . is patently disadvantageous: an impudent use of time and energy at best, and downright dangerous at worst. Yet since many animals dream, evolutionary biologists assume that it must have adaptive advantages . . . In dreams we are attracted to abstractions, to novelty and hyper-associativeness. We are, one might say, more playful."

Kelly Bulkeley, a psychologist and author who specializes in dream research speculates that "dreaming is play enacted within the mind and freed of the body, and so freed of the body's needs and limitations."

Toomey builds on this, writing, "If dreaming is disembodied play, then perhaps play is embodied dreaming. If in dreaming we are playing without bodies, then perhaps in play we are using our bodies to dream."

What an intriguing idea, one that fits my own observations of play, especially pretend or dramatic play in which children embody superheroes and princesses and firefighters and doctors. It is dreamlike the way they freely associate, transforming sticks into weapons and wands, ropes into fire hoses, and fingers into scalpels. And like in dreams there is an ebb and flow from one thing to the next as their games easily, and often surprisingly, evolve from one thing to the next; in which difficulties resolve or become nightmarish in an instant; and it all ends with an "awakening" be it a school bell, an injury, or an adult intervention, after which they return to the humdrum of reality.

The big difference, of course, is that in a dream it's said that all the characters represent an aspect of dreamer's self. In play, in contrast, everyone else is likewise an embodied dreamer, and the game we play, the story we tell, is a collective dream.

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We live in an era of "bubble wrapped" children and helicopter parents, yet we know that healthy exposure to risk-taking through play is essential for proper brain development, self-confidence, and physical competence, not to mention social-emotional and intellectual development. My 6-week course, Teacher Tom's Risky Play, is a deep-dive into the value and importance of risky play, or safety play, and an exploration of how we can overcome media fear-mongering and catastrophic imaginations, and work with regulators, to create "safe enough" environments in which the children in our lives can engage in the kind of appropriate risk-taking they need to thrive, both today and into the future. To register and learn more, click here.

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