Pay Attention to Your Dreams: They Can Change Your Life

Trust me, I speak from experience

Adapted from The Girl in the Yellow Poncho

“Dreaming is a state of psychosis. You know that right?” the late J. Allan Hobson, the ever-contentious professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School told me this years ago when I interviewed him for a magazine article. Widely credited as the father of modern neurological dream research, he said this as though itching for a fight. Blue eyes laughing, white hair slightly disheveled, he added, “Every night when you go to sleep, you’re loony as a coot.”

As someone who had always been obsessed with dreaming, I didn’t believe a word he said. I knew better. For years, my dreams had been my salvation, leading me out of my despair via images and metaphors that were as simple as they were profound. As a young biracial woman, growing up in an era long before that was common, I wrestled with painful questions about my identity. Dreams helped me through this morass. I recorded them in my journals and for years, they pointed the way.

In one, a shy ghost child climbed a long, spiral staircase. I tried to see more of her but she was invisible, revealing only a beige arm here, or a floating scarf there. “Can you show me more?” I asked in my dream. The question caused her to lash out with…