(ESSAY) 'Sucked in by the dream world' by Adriana Alcaraz Sánchez

Philosopher Adriana Alcaraz Sánchez explores the transformative potential of dreams — from epic dreaming to dream incubation.

There’s a scene from Inception that has stuck with me: the one where Yusuf, the chemist, introduces the team to a group of “dream addicts” to demonstrate the effects of a new drug that pulls them deep into the dream world. The setting of the scene evokes the opium dens of the 19^th century, but instead of pipes, the addicts lie in beds, receiving a continuous intravenous dose of Somnacin. 

The dream addicts are depicted as outcasts, mentally ill individuals who would rather live in the dream world than face the challenges of reality. They have become dream-dependent — after spending so much time dreaming, the dream world feels more real than reality itself.  Dreaming is their only way to bring meaning to their lives. Much like an internet addict who might feel their online persona is their true self and resource to the digital world as their preferred one. 

This scene resonates with me at different levels. 

There have been times when I’ve had dreams that felt hyperreal. It’s a very uncanny experience. Not only do I realise that I’m dreaming, but I kind of gain an insight into the illusory nature of what I’m experiencing. In a way, I become aware that my whole experience is just an orchestrated creation of my mind. Even though everything might appear indistinguishable from the waking world, I am, in fact, sound asleep in my bed. But I’m not aware of my body sleeping, nor my bed or bedroom. Instead, I’m fully immersed in this fake reality. 

Sometimes, this realisation fills me with awe: I’m amazed by my mind’s ability to create a world that feels extremely real even if it isn’t. Other times though, it brings me a strong feeling of dread. Panic sets in. What if I don’t wake up? What if this becomes my new world, my new reality? How do I return to the ‘“real’ ” world?

Eventually – unless you’re in a coma – you wake up from your dreams. But the possibility that, like the main character in Inception, one could get lost in their dreams has always unsettled me.  So, is there any truth to this fear? Could I, in some way, become stuck in a dream? Much like the worry about the many hours we spend on social media, I worry about the consequences of spending too much time dreaming. 

Recently, I came across a rare phenomenon known as epic dreaming. Despite its name, the term refers to the experience of recurrent, excessive dreaming (Schenck & Mahowald, 1995). Epic dreamers feel as if they dreamt all night long, with dreams that seem endless, highly realistic, and with intricate plots (Lin, 2023). Upon awakening, epic dreamers report feeling extremely exhausted — as though they actually lived all the adventures they recall, rather than having been sound asleep. 

Apart from a couple of mentions of the phenomenon in the classic literature of dreaming, epic dreaming has been largely overlooked. A key question is whether individuals are indeed dreaming non-stop from the moment they close their eyes, or if it just feels that way because they don’t remember any gaps. But what if it were possible to dream for eight hours straight, without breaks, just as we remain conscious for the same stretch of time while awake? In that case, wouldn’t the dream world become an entire second life — an extension of our daily existence, much like our digital lives on social media? If so, dreams would become a significant part of our lives and a significant part of who we are. 

I think that for a time I experienced epic dreaming. For years, I would wake up very tired and drained, with a foggy mind, vividly recalling long and intense dreams. Although I knew they were just dreams, part of me felt as though I had actually lived all those activities I recalled. Sometimes, I wasn’t entirely sure about the illusory nature of my memories. They felt so authentic, and their content was quite banal — often about mundane things like meeting with a colleague at work to discuss my research (which, funnily enough, happens to be about the philosophy of dreaming). 

Many times, I’ve woken up filled with excitement after reuniting with an old friend in a dream. I feel an overwhelming urge to text them. I feel that I need to share with them our joint adventures, adventures that for me were extremely real but that sadly, to them, they never happened. I wish I could share my dream memories the way I share memes containing inside jokes with my best friends on Instagram — a way to connect through emotion. The experiences I have in my dreams, including the emotions they trigger are part of me, and so, I like to share them.

The dream addict’s scene in Inception also makes me think about how dreams can be revelatory, or even moving, to the point that they profoundly affect our waking lives. After all, if you’d rather live the dream world than the real one, dreams must offer something that life cannot. 

A peculiar example of highly transformative dreams is that of ‘anaesthesia dreams’, dreams had during some medical procedure involving general anaesthesia (such as propofol). These kinds of dreams are said to be not only extraordinarily vivid and realistic but also capable of triggering significant psychological shifts. There are anecdotal cases of patients recovering from trauma – such as PTSD or acute stress disorder – following the experience of an anaesthetic-induced dream. Some have suggested that anaesthesia dreams might act as an accelerated form of exposure therapy helping to reprocess previous negative memories connected to certain traumatic events (Chow et al., 2022). 

While the negative impact dreams might have on our psyche is widely known – we all have woken up from horrific nightmares at some point – their benefits tend to receive far less attention.

Dreams are often seen as passive experiences — things that happen to us when asleep and that are beyond our control. Once I close my eyes, I feel as though I’m at the mercy of Morpheus — the plot of the dreams is chosen for me as if I was attending an immersive cinema experience where the programming has been curated.

However, while dreams might appear undeliberated and uncontrollable, their content and the way they unfold are less randomised and bizarre than we might think. There’s some truth about Freudian psychoanalysis regarding the role of the unconscious in dreaming, but the explanation is likely simpler than the complex interplay between repressed desires and sexually-themed archetypes. Ultimately, dreams are an extension of our waking lives, and as such, they display a strong continuity with them. Our daily concerns and waking musings surface when we sleep, permeating and shaping our dream world. 

In recent years, research on ‘“dream incubation’” has gained traction. The term refers to the belief held in ancient times that dreams contained messages from supernatural forces — their content was regarded as a powerful source of guidance and insight and thus, it was taken seriously. The ancient Greeks, for example, practised certain purification rituals to prepare themselves for dreaming, hoping to receive answers to pressing questions. 

Today, dream incubation has been targeted as a practice to exert some control over the dream content, for instance, for creativity purposes. Some research has shown that the liminal state between wakefulness and sleep, the moment when you feel yourself dozing off, can be used to enhance creative performance (Horowitz et al. 2023). What those practices do is instruct participants to pay attention to the process of falling asleep while focusing on a particular theme or problem in their minds, which then unfolds in the form of a full-fledged dream experience.

As a dream researcher, I often joke that my napping counts as ‘“research time”’. If I stay mindful and observe my thoughts as I drift into sleep, I sometimes find myself transported into a dream world where I find inspiration for the questions I have been pondering over while awake. Of course, this is only useful if I jot down my thoughts immediately after waking up, or if I remain in a hypnagogic state where I’m not fully asleep. Even then, I have to take these “insights” with a pinch of salt — what seems like a brilliant revelation in a dream may turn out, upon reflection, to be complete nonsense.

Like any other activity, dreaming has its benefits and drawbacks. Too much of it and the line between reality and imagination may begin to blur. But to some extent, allowing the dream world to bleed into the waking one can be a useful source of creativity and insight. Much like our digital world, it can be exploited for personal exploration. Yet, no matter how realistic the dream world may turn out to be, we must not forget the world we belong to.  

References

Chow, H. S. et al. (2022) ‘Anesthetic-Induced Intraoperative Dream Associated With Remission of a Psychiatric Disorder: A Case Report’, A&A practice, 16(8), 1-4

Horowitz, A.H., Esfahany, K., Gálvez, T.V., Maes, P., and Stickgold, R. (2023). Targeted dream incubation at sleep onset increases post-sleep creative performance. Scientific Reports, 13, 7319, 1-16.

Lin, C. (2023) ‘An Investigation on the Nature of Epic Dreaming — Is It Nightmare or Vivid Dream’, Advances in Education, Humanities and Social Science Research, 4(1), 306-310

Schenck, C. H. and Mahowald, M. W. (1995) ‘A disorder of epic dreaming with daytime fatigue, usually without polysomnographic abnormalities, that predominantly affects women’, Sleep Research, 24, p. 137. 

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Text: Adriana Alcaraz Sánchez

Image: Adriana Alcaraz Sánchez

Published: 23/09/25