dreams are madness waiting for a sane explanation

Every night we go mad. Not as metaphor — as biology. We surrender consciousness and enter a state where logic dissolves, time collapses, the dead speak, and none of it strikes us as strange.

And then we wake up and spend the day performing sanity.

I wrote a long essay about this: about why dreams might be what keeps our meaning-seeking capacity alive while we're in no condition to pursue it. About how every intellectual tradition — psychoanalysis, neuroscience, existentialism — has tried to tame dreams into something explainable, and what gets lost in the taming. About a kitchen in Sintra where a group of strangers managed to have a genuinely dream-like conversation — until someone mentioned performance reviews, and the room woke up.

And about a dream I had during a thunderstorm in Tulum, where a dead man I loved told me that lightning doesn't have time to talk to thunder.

https://useful-uselessness.com/dreams-are-madness-waiting-for-a-sane-explanation/