Have you ever had a dream in which you've been browsing the internet? I mean really browsing—scrolling through feeds, clicking links, searching for something you can't quite name.
Not the old anxiety dreams of showing up to school in your underpants to take a test. More like sending someone the wrong emoji. A nightmare of cold fear consisting of 'Let me Google that real quick' instead of someone chasing you with a knife.
I don't think I've ever dreamt of being on a computer at all. Strange, since I spend so much time on one. If our waking experience serves as context for dreams, what happens with this time we spend on computers? Is it just gathered and junk-collected, discarded? If these waking hours of clicking items and pecking on keys aren't worthy of dreams, why are we insisting on the need to do it in an ever more streamlined way?
Keep a dream journal
I started writing down what I can recall of my dreams each morning. It's one of those on-again, off-again habits. Low effort, high return—best if you do it consistently, which I intend to persist at. Dream journaling is easily paired with a phase of freewriting in the morning.
The act of describing dreams before they evaporate is itself a kind of freewriting, because it blathers through that fertile liminal space where the unconscious still has its arm around your shoulder. Rendering things into form in such a state builds a bridge with the woolly and uncivilized parts of the psyche.
Jung believed that dreams are direct messages from the unconscious, that they serve a compensatory function that helps integrate unconscious contents. He saw them as windows into the deeper aspects of the self. I find it catastrophically arrogant how common it is for people to disparage dreams as if they're nothing more than random firings of neurons or emotional offgassing from the day's productive work. Sleep is a part of life. Choosing to decide ourselves ignorant to it simply because it's mysterious is a real bum move.
Dreams offer meaningful communications from parts of ourselves we've lost touch with. Jung said it in these words: "the dream is a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious."
So what does it mean that most of our waking life has become, in a sense, irrelevant to this ancient system of psychic digestion? Why don't I ever dream about working on a laptop?
As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols. Every dream is evidence of this process.
- Carl Jung
But what symbols grow from the LED-lit soil of clicking and scrolling?
People say that blue light from screens reduces the amount of time spent in REM sleep—the very stage where our most vivid dreams occur. But I don't think this is something rose-colored glasses can solve. We may be literally engineering ourselves out of the dream world.
Think about what we're trading away. Jung brought the insight that dreams sometimes use symbols as myths to express their themes, and that they access archetypal content from the collective unconscious. These are the deep waters where personal transformation happens, where the psyche works through its knots and discovers new patterns. Some dreams are apt to be remembered for a lifetime. They can bring spiritual significance and transform how we view ourselves and the world.
But you can't build the compost of archetypes if you're doomscrolling. The psyche needs raw, embodied experience to work with. Not "digital content."
Neither here nor there
If digital activities can't even make it into our dreams, how worth doing are they? Digital life is neither here nor there. It's some strange limbo between experience and non-experience.
I think we're creating a kind of experiential malnutrition. Not starvation exactly, but the kind that comes from eating only processed food. The body might survive, the mind might be productive, but something essential withers in the background while we're too busy and fatigued to notice.
Jung brought the realization that you develop psychologically by bringing unconscious contents into the light of consciousness, that this process enriches our personality and makes us more self-aware. So, again, I ask the question: what if we're spending our days in ways that generate no unconscious content worth surfacing?
It's not that technology is inherently empty of meaning. Or is it? Is digital experience merely memetic?
The dream deficit
We all know that increased screen time is linked to poorer sleep and lower dream recall. In this way, "screen time" is an apt term—we're placing a sieve in between us and our experience, and what gets filtered through is basically just dopamine, neural activation, and an economic exchange.
Each subsequent generation will dream less, remember less of what they do dream, and have less raw material for the psyche to work with in the first place.
I think this matters more than we realize. Dreams can serve as an early warning system for our physical and mental health, with the unconscious being capable of detecting subtle abnormalities long before symptoms appear. They're how we process trauma, consolidate memory, and tap into creative insights. Many of civilization's great creations and discoveries have been inspired by dreams—from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein born from a nightmare of a 'hideous phantasm' stirring to life, to Kekulé's benzene ring revealed by a serpent swallowing its tail. Niels Bohr saw electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets around the sun, giving us the structure of the atom. Einstein's theory of relativity emerged from a dream about cows and electric fences, while the mathematician Ramanujan received thousands of mathematical proofs through his dreams.
What revelations are we missing? What healing isn't happening? What creative breakthroughs remain forever ungerminated because we've replaced the rich soil of lived experience with the substrate of screen time?
Have you ever attended a Zoom meeting in a dream? I haven't. But for that at least, I'm grateful.
Reclaiming the night
If an experience isn't worthy of being transformed into dream material, is it worthy of our waking hours? If the psyche—that ancient, wise part of ourselves that's been processing human experience since we first became human—finds nothing to work with in our daily digital consumption, what does that tell us?
A morning writing practice helps. When you freewrite first thing, you're catching yourself in that liminal space where the dream world hasn't quite been dried up by the aridity of waking life and its beeps and burps. Keeping a dream journal—which for me is as simple as writing a few sentences in a notebook—gives the unconscious a voice before the conscious mind fully boots up with its to-do lists and notifications. For me, it's important that I have a durable bridge into the dark forest of the psyche.
But we need more than just dream recall. We need experiences worth dreaming about. Real encounters, genuine struggles, embodied adventures. The kind of raw material the psyche has been working with for millennia—love and loss, fear and courage, beauty and ugliness, human connection, adventures in new lands, all of it unmediated and immediate.
Marie-Louise von Franz described important dreams as "like a visitation from another world, which in truth it is, the other world being the subterranean one of the unconscious." These visitations are getting rarer, not because the unconscious has less to say, but because we're giving it less to work with and less time to work.
Let's give the psyche something to chew on besides the thin gruel of optimized content. Dreams are messengers, so if the messenger is radio silent, that's the message. An absence of rich dreams tells us that the human soul needs something more substantial than what American prosperity dogma wants to feed it.
After all, what's the point of optimizing every waking moment if we're starving the very part of ourselves that makes meaning from it all?