Social media feeds are quickly filling up with images of family get togethers.. costume parties.. Halloween hijinks. Halloween, Samhain, the season of the witch.. it’s here.
This year felt a bit different for several personal reasons.. In a family crisis, we have been dealing with stresses that are, for many, just mundane. Life and death decisions in the darkest time of the year.. This is the second year where most of the Halloween season has been overtaken by hospital visitations and prayers for healing for a family member, this time my father.. It can be overwhelming..
But this is life, right?
It seems that holiday seasons of all kinds amplify these personal crises. Whether it’s Halloween or even Christmas, those nightmare scenarios of reality overtake the marketing and decor.. We still put up the lights, but with fright. Fright over the morbid reality that so often awaits us.
For this post, let’s set the mood.. the theme of Halloween 3 may assist..
Halloween is that stark reminder of the saints and souls that have perished before us.. And our unfortunate demise to come. We adorn the masks in order to scare away Jack and avoid being recognized by ghosts. After all, Samhain is the moment when the fabric of worlds fray. When the season of growth has ended, and the harvest has begun. The darkness is creeping in..
The Celts knew the drill. Darkness would fall across the land.. the midnight hour would soon be close at hand..
With that darkness comes the eventual need to sleep. Hibernation comes naturally for animals around this time of year. We as humans fight the urge off because offices need our busy minds to type away into oblivion. Work beckons! But naturally, we just want to turn that switch and sleep when the sun begins to set at an earlier and earlier hour in the late autumn..
With sleep comes dreams..
Those nocturnal displays of insanity..
At a certain level, dreams are just completely unexplainable. Perhaps we have all been trapped on that path where we over analyze dreams, trying to find a meaning in the mostly meaningless. We grasp at straws and Google up the imagery from the nightmare when we recall them in our waking hours…
Could it teach us a lesson?
Give us a warning?
Show us the future!?
Most likely none of the above. But we still strive for something to give us the proper path in life. After all, in the end, we walk that path alone. So why not let a nightmare or dreamscape give us an added bonus of knowledge, right?
So think of those dreams.. those nightmares at times. Nothing is more ‘Halloween’ than the fleeting moments in the 3am hour when you are deep in another world–where are you, and what is your brain doing when you’re there? For those few hours or few seconds the dream manifests, that is your reality.
Some of these dreams can be down right frightening–Halloween style. Images of our daily lives pop up during these nightly escapes..
During dreams we see a lot! People.. things.. but … What don’t we see?
So a few weeks ago, I had a dream that truly was intriguing. From what I recall, my dream centered around my son Ayden wanting to order food from May’s Drive Inn.. but unfortunately it was almost 9pm, so May’s was most likely closed. I “called” them. But my phone was NOT in the dream.. instead I was in person ordering at May’s … but in my dream, my in person visit was the ‘call.’
A few nights later–this all is a true–I had another dream.. this time I recall just a bit, but it was about TALKING about phone calls I was getting, talking about my phone itself. But my phone never appeared in the dream. And then while STILL in the dream in reality, I was telling people how it was interesting that I had a dream about a phone where I never saw a phone.
When I woke up–now in real life–I realized how I had a dream within a dream about phones and yet, somehow, never saw a phone even once.
So of course, we got to searching.
A few weeks ago, in response to this series of phone-less dreams about phones, we asked a truly unscientific poll of readers: Do you ever see your phone in a dream?
The answer was interesting. Basically, for the most part, no. NO one does.
So we are faced with a dilemma .. or dilemna as it was before the Mandela Effect changed the spelling 🙂
Is our survey accurate. Do people really not see phones in dreams? We use them daily–and have used them for the most part for our entire lives. Cell phones for about the last 22 years or so.. smart phones for about 12 years. Yet somehow these devices are not showing up in our night visions? Could that be true?
A story several years ago in 2018 tried to explain this strange lack of smart phones in our dreams..
..Alice Robb, author of the forthcoming book Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey, to explain our phones’ relative absence from our dreams, and she introduced me to what’s called the “threat simulation hypothesis” of dreaming. “[This theory] basically suggests that the reason why we dream is that dreams allow us to work through our anxieties and our fears in a more low-risk environment, so we’re able to practice for stressful events,” says Robb. This hypothesis also posits that because our dreams are an evolved defense mechanism, we tend to dream more often about fears and concerns that were relevant to our ancestors — so, less about, say, hacking, and more about running from wild animals. “People tend not to dream quite as much about reading and writing, which are more recent developments in human history, and more about survival related things, like fighting, even if that has nothing to do with who you are in real life,” says Robb.
There was a survey in 2016 that tried to determine some numbers about dreams, and how little technology appears .. analyzing data from more than 16,000 dream reports, researchers then showed that cell phones appear in 3.55 percent of women’s dreams (and 2.69 percent of men’s)..
A Reddit thread showcases interesting theories on the lack of cell phones in dreams in 2016..
There were debates about why we did not see cell phones in dreams in 2014..
But these links come from studies or threads from years ago. By now, 2022 *when this is being written* did we not use phones long enough that they should appear? Shouldn’t we have moved beyond this cellphone blackout in our night visions?
It seems like ‘no.’
We took our very unscientific Facebook poll to the real world, asking people in our friend/work/family circles if they see phones in their dreams. The overwhelming answer is no. But few take the time to really figure out why.
If we did see any kind of tech in our dreams, chances are it would not work right anyway, since dreams skew our reality.
Science will tell us that since cell phones are recent we are not going to see cell phones.. At all.
But.. as time goes on, we will?
So I asked children–people under the age of 15 down to 7 or so in my son’s friend circle and asked the question: Do you ever see phones in your dreams?
…they are young, and they grew up with cell phones since birth. It was not a “new” thing for them.
But they, too, did not see cell phones in their dreams.. at all.
Is that as creepy to you as it is to us??
I Dare you.. Dream of a phone. And if you do, let us know. Perhaps that in itself will be the scariest thing this All Hallow’s Eve…
