Put It to Rest

There are certain dilemmas that cannot be tended to without sleep. When an ordeal hurls itself my way, bombarding me with competing values locked in opposition, when my intuition slips from reach, when I feel inferior to Sisyphus—unable even to hoist the boulder off the ground, stuck at the foot of the hill, dropping it again and again, unable to carry the burden forward—on these days, I know to set effort aside and surrender until morning.

Clarity, it turns out, has its own circadian rhythm. It waits for us on the other side of slumber, after we’ve cycled through its stages: light sleep, non-REM, deep sleep, and most importantly, REM. REM sleep is the stage in which we dream, and through which our discernment and self-attunement often re-emerges.

It may seem puzzling that dreaming—fantastical and bemusing as it is—could restore lucidity. Sleep researcher William Dement famously said “Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives." Each evening, behind closed eyes, a surrealist film—drawn from the raw material of our waking life—is projected between our temples, and we embark on a wild nighttime ride filled with strong feelings, physicality, and striking imagery. Inevitably, we all find ourselves with someone who cannot wait to tell us about their “crazy dream,” though we all know the telling will land flat. During REM sleep, our brain’s emotional, motor, visual, and autobiographical memory regions are active, while the regions concerning rational thinking are largely offline. Re-telling a dream never suffices to interest or make sense to the listener, and nonetheless we have all felt compelled to share the vivid impressions dreams leave behind.

So how can dreams—irrational, nonlinear, and often inscrutable to others—offer clarity?

Psychologists have long speculated about the role of dreaming. Freud believed dreams were disguised expressions of repressed desires. Jung saw them as containing symbolic messages from the unconscious. But contemporary neuroscience tells a different story—one that’s just as keen at bringing coherence and meaning to our lives.

In Why We Sleep, Walker writes:

“The process of REM-sleep dreaming accomplishes two critical goals:

(1) sleeping to remember the details of those valuable, salient experiences, integrating them

with existing knowledge and putting them into autobiographical perspective, yet

(2) sleeping to forget, or dissolve, the visceral, painful emotional charge

that had previously been wrapped around those memories.”

Dreams are an essential process for regulating, integrating, and learning from the emotions we experience in waking life. The symbols and surreal imagery within dreams that so captivated Freud and Jung are not the key substance, but rather props that support the real work: the emotional processing. By day, the brain flags emotionally charged content; by night, in the neurochemical calm of REM sleep—when stress hormones like norepinephrine are suppressed—it processes those moments more freely. As Harvard’s Robert Stickgold notes, our dreams aren’t replays of the day’s events—they are a reprocessing of their emotional significance.^[1] The coherence that emerges from dreaming doesn’t come from interpreting the minutiae of its content, but from the larger adaptive process it serves.

How remarkable—and how seemingly kind—that the body evolved to metabolize difficult emotions without reactivating the stress of them. And what does it say about us that, in doing so, the brain privileges the visual and physical over the rational?^[2] Insight often arrives in the same fashion– not deduced, but felt.

In sleep, the brain moonlights as an editor—taking the raw material of my life and synthesizing it into coherence. My midnight editor holds reverence for what’s precious and is yet discerning on what can be gently let go. I imagine a great cataloguing all-nighter: sorting, labeling, stacking experiences into piles—cross-checking with my long-term memory archive, aiming to form new associations, adapt to challenges, and make meaning. This sorting sharpens what’s most salient, especially when I’m stuck on the fence over life’s ordeals. I know I can trust in the z’s to clear out the clutter.

This gives us reason to cast away the old advice to “never go to bed angry.”^[3] I go to bed especially when I am angry—when I am tangled in anxiety, guilt, sadness, disillusionment, or even euphoria, too. I surrender to slumber, knowing that by morning, my intuition and conviction will be restored.

Sleep carries us where effort cannot. It takes the reins and discerns what’s worth holding on to, and what’s worth releasing. Instead, let us pledge allegiance to a wiser adage: sleep on it.^[4] Sometimes the best way forward is to simply put it to rest.

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^[1] While only 1–2% of dreams reflected a direct replay of the day’s events, Stickgold’s findings suggest that 35–55% of dream content echoed the emotional themes and concerns from recent waking life, according to Matthew Walker.

^[2] Furthermore, it is also interesting that dreams aren’t marked by smells, as the olfactory bulb is strongly connected to the amygdala (involved in emotion) and the hippocampus (involved with memory).

^[3] This adage likely comes from the biblical passage, “Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry...” —Ephesians 4:26, NIV. This passage likely intended to encourage processing anger quickly so as to preserve relationships and not commit sin out of anger.

^[4] The first usage of this adage was recorded in 1519 in the state papers of King Henry VIII: “His Grace ... said that he would sleep and dream upon the matter.”