Our family, at various times, has required a team of wraparound care providers. For a couple of years, one of those professionals was a Josh, an in-home therapist (IHT). He came into our condo at least once a week to support one of my kids in crisis, but he also helped us with weekly family therapy. After getting to know us fairly well, he suggested that we write a family mission statement that included short-term and long-term visions for each member of the family. My husband and I overdelivered by providing a hand-drawn coat of arms with a family motto:

"Sleep Is for the Weak!”

Josh took a look at our finished product, pointed to motto and said, “No, that’s unhealthy.” And he made us change it. That is how we came up with our new family motto:

“Lead with Love.”

Josh approved of the revision, and this is what our family has used ever since. I occasionally write Lead with Love at the top of my rough drafts of documents whenever I feel like I have lost my way in what I am trying to say. Even when I need to be critical, I try to be as compassionate as possible. I don’t always succeed, but I feel like my life is improved for having kept this principle in mind.

In my years as a special education advocate supporting other families who have children with disabilities, I have found sleep deprivation to be a common and debilitating condition for a lot of parents. One of my friends had cases and cases of energy drinks in the house because of the a life-threatening diagnosis that required a night watch over their medically-fragile child. Although my situation is not nearly that bad, this past year has been very difficult, and I found myself sleeping less and less, becoming more stressed, and finally by year’s end getting extremely sick.

Sleep isn’t a luxury, although sometimes we I treat it like it is. Humans need sleep in order to survive. It is necessary for brain development, memory consolidation, and emotional processing. Researchers have also discovered that during sleep the glymphatic system drains waste products from the brain. Cerebrospinal fluid, a clear liquid surrounding the brain and spinal cord, moves through the brain along a series of channels that surround blood vessels and can remove a toxic protein called beta-amyloid from brain tissue, a protein that accumulates in Alzheimer’s patients.

When I decided to prioritize getting more than 4-5 hours of sleep a night, I had to find the “extra” sleep hours. The main casualty was my writing time, and this is why I started publishing twice a month instead of my weekly posts.

However, one of the features of getting more sleep is that I seem to be able to remember more of my dreams.

Vivid dreaming is something that most often happens during REM sleep, which occurs about 90-120 minutes after falling asleep. Experts say adults need an average of two hours of REM sleep night. Now that I am getting 6-7 hours of sleep I think I must be getting more (and better quality) REM. When I wake up I can often remember at least some of my dreams.

Perhaps you can help me interpret this dream from Sunday night…

I was running from a narrow, cedar shingled house I was living in. It was winter, and I was with two friends I couldn’t identify. It was the dead of night, and the streetlights were the only things that marked the road. Cars were completely covered with snow, only identifiable by their outlines. I had to climb over them to get to the sidewalk. There was a tall fence that I should have been able to scale easily, but somehow I could not lift my leg over the side. A dark woman beneath a streetlamp said, “You won’t be able to do that so easily.” But I made my way over and up the steps to a brownstone that emanated with warm, yellow light. I opened the front door and entered a small porch. I could not see the floor for all the baby shoes covering it — many colors and neatly laid out in pairs. Through the entryway I could see into the main house: a welcoming outdoor landscape in daylight much like the Japanese artwork.1 A bridge over water. Cherry blossoms on some trees. Golden persimmons on others. It was warm and bright, but there was a door to the right in the portico that I was supposed to enter.

Through the door on the right I entered and saw there were more baby shoes on the floor. People sat in chairs. It was a therapist’s waiting room. I found a woman, a mother-friend from years ago, she held in her hand a drum. When I sat down I found myself holding a percussion-shaker instrument (like this one but longer). I watched my friend beat a rhythm, and I tried to follow but every time I looked down I was holding a different percussion-shaker.

And then I woke up.

Does my dream have to do with something I am currently reading?

I am often reading many books at the same time, but this particular night I had three I had read within the 90 minutes of going to sleep. I have found that my reading materials often influence my dreams, but in this case I’m not sure…

Almagest by Claudius Ptolemy

I am in the middle of a Catherine Project course, and this week’s assignment was a section of Ptolemy’s Almagest, a 2nd-century mathematical and astronomical treatise. The course I am taking is called “Life of the Mind” which is part of the Core Program that the Catherine Project has developed. Here’s the description from their website:

Over the course of 12 meetings, 10-16 readers will explore a strange and wonderful landscape of texts selected as excellent introductions to enduring ideas and questions. Each Seminar is co-led by two experienced guides in conversation who are zealous about their own learning. Seminars meet once a week for 2 hours and readers are asked to prepare a question about each week’s reading prior to meetings.

(It just so happens that my friend

I remember being fascinated by Ptolemy figuring out the seasons, and I wonder if I had winter and spring in my dream because of this.

That night I also read…

Townie by Andre Dubus III

I mentioned in a Note that I had read Dubus‘s most recent book of essays, Ghost Dogs. I liked it so much that I went right out and got Townie, the full memoir.

Ghost Dogs is a collection of essays that read like short stories about a carpenter, a bounty hunter, and a bartender in New York City. The first couple were so much like fiction that I had to check the cover again to make sure I was reading non-fiction. However, it becomes very clear that these are taken from his life as the son of the famous short story writer, Andre Dubus. His mother was left to raise four children by herself in a succession of decrepit rental homes in northern Massachusetts. His childhood was destructive and deprived, and in both the Ghost Dogs and Townie, Dubus deftly explores the power of violence and what it means to be a man in a fatherless house. (I found a lot of overlap with some of the themes that

In my dream, the house I was running from seemed like the type of house I was reading about in Townie.

And I also read…

Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf

I first became aware of Maryanne Wolf’s work through her earlier book, Proust and the Squid, which I highly recommend. I picked it up as a way to educate myself on the challenges of some of the families I worked with whose children have Language-Based Learning Disabilities (LBLDs) like dyslexia. Reader, Come Home is just as fascinating. It pairs very well with

Wolf writes about the importance of “deep reading” and how we are losing it as a skill. She also speaks to the importance of being biliterate, meaning that we should be able to read well on the written page and also in digital media.2 Technology is not going away, and the medium on which we receive information changes our brains. Much like Socrates’s concerns about what writing would do to our mind’s ability to remember information, the advancements in digital technology is impacting our attention spans and how we actually read things.

At the beginning of “Letter Four” (what she called the fourth chapter) Wolf has these two epigraphs, one from a poet and one from a priest:

In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart, 
— The hardest of a quiet eye.  

from "A Poet's Epitaph" by William Wordsworth (1770–1850) an English Romantic poet

As the devotion of a life, the way of words, of knowing and loving words, is a way to the essence of things, and to the essence of knowing too… What is required  for allowing that is knowing, for a knowing that is loving, is the quiet eye. 

John S. Dunne (1929–2013) an American priest and theologian of the Congregation of Holy Cross. 

Wordsworth understands the “quiet eye” as something so essential to poetry, but today it we have seemed to have lost this way of seeing the world in the 21st century. Readers have become habituated to overstimulation, not through lack of discipline but due to the way our technology has been engineered to capture our attention and make us look at what profit-driven forces want us to look at. Our minds have been hypertrained for novelty, and our quality of attention has degraded as we have evolved to a screen-based life. Sleep may be one of our last natural defenses against the bombardment of media in our lives, and thus we should safeguard our sleep more carefully than ever.

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

―William Shakespeare, The Tempest

As I started to think about poetry and dreams, I realized that the natural act of dreaming takes our memories and removes a certain amount of rationalization and bias. The parts of the brain that are the most active during our dreaming state are responsible for processing visual imagery (the visual cortex), emotions (amygdala), sensory information (thalamus), and memory (hippocampus). What we experience in many dreams is image and emotion, such obvious characteristics of Romantic poetry.

Dreams are a recurrent theme in so much famous poetry. I think of Samuel Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” which bears the subtitle: Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment. You see dreams in much of Christina Rossetti’s poetry, like “Echo”, “Monna Innominata [I dream of you, to wake]”, “Dream Land”, “My Dream”, and “From House to Home”.3 In many of Rossetti’s poems and this list of poems about dreams and sleep compiled by the Academy of American Poets, one sees sleep is often employed as a metaphor for death. And of course, we have Hamlet: To die, to sleep—To sleep, perchance to dream—Ay, there's the rub!

I am sure this could be the topic for a book. Alas, Substack’s app is telling me I’ve gone on too long and you’ve likely lost interest and started clicking on something else. I am writing this in a digital newsletter after all.

Before screens took over our world we likely had better attention spans, but maybe we also had more sleep and more dreams? We certainly had some great songs about them. For your consideration, I give you some music from the era that ruined the ozone layer:

That’s what dreams are made of…

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Pax et Bonum,

Zina

1

Much like this: Evening Glow at Koganei Border, Utagawa Hiroshige Japanese (1797–1858)