Country Living with Francis Farragher

Like a fair few other people that I know, I share a kind of fascination about sleep and dreams, and how a subconscious mind can come up with some of the outlandish adventures that are embarked upon in the dead of night without anyone else knowing about it.

I do take some reassurance from the observations of learned experts of the mind that we all dream, but only some of us and only sometimes, do we recall what the story was all about. Apparently, the trick is to recall the dream content in that second or two after wakening up or else it can be lost forever, and I suppose one could conclude, ‘well what the heck if I don’t remember it’.

Dreams seem to come in three categories: the nightmares; more pleasant ones; and a third category which just defies any kind of definition or logic – weird, but not necessarily in a bad way.

Sometime last year, I read a piece in The Guardian newspaper written by a neuroscientist called Rahul Jandial who has also authored a book entitled: ‘This Is Why You Dream’, who makes the point that dreams are very much an intrinsic part of our mental and body mechanisms.

One of his points is that dreams just aren’t confined to REM [rapid eyelid movement] periods of sleep and that its possible that we enter dreamworld for at least a few, or more hours, every night. On the basis of sleeping for eight hours a night, this means that we dream our way through life, for possibly up to one third of our time on this planet.

He outlines a number of potential theories as to why dreams are beneficial to our existence such as keeping our minds and brains ‘nimble while we sleep’; making us more intuitive; presenting us with outrageous scenarios to help us better comprehend ordinary scenarios when we’re wide awake; and rehearsing threats so that we prepare better for upcoming events.

One of Rahul Jandial’s examples really struck a chord with me, where he noted the findings of a study on medical students, who dreamed about things going terribly wrong during their exams, but who then went on the next day ‘in the real world’ to do far better than expected in the tests.

To this day, in my life, and many decades on from sitting the Leaving Cert examination, I still encounter the nightmare scenario in the darkest hours of sleep, of the Honours English Paper, being left on my exam desk and realising that I hadn’t read one poem, one novel or one play that was on the curriculum.

Pictured: A strange nocturnal world.