If I do a session of sitting meditation in a dream does that count as my recommended daily 10-minute session? Eh? No? Dang.
I ask because I’ve been dreaming a lot lately. I attribute this, in part, to sleeping more but I notice that dreaming is also cyclical. I have bouts of intense dreaming for a month or two and then don’t remember a thing for a while. A few weeks ago, I had a vivid dream about meditating with my friend Sarah-Doe in a windy field. We sat on brown zafus, grass tickling our knees. After a while, a Buddha-like figure materialized and sat in front of us. He was serene and of indeterminate age and wore red robes, like one of the monks from Tintin in Tibet. I had a sensation of receiving instruction and serenity. I looked at the trees shaking in the wind and woke up. 

As we say in the biz, good dream.
Over the past weeks, as I tell friends about a singular dream (aren’t they all, though?) or one in which they had a cameo, they report to dreaming a lot, too. This leads me to wonder if, in uncertain times, people dream more.

Does the collective mind function like the individual? Emma Young’s excellent article in New Scientist, on sleep and it’s connection to PTSD, ADD, and other psychological disorders, explains:

 
In another strand of research, evidence is growing that sleep – and dreaming, REM sleep, in particular – helps the brain to process memories. Disrupt this mechanism, and you could end up with psychological problems such as PTSD.
In August 2008, Stickgold and colleagues reported that when people are presented with pictures of an emotional or neutral object or scene, their memory for these scenes decreases during the day. After a night’s sleep, they forget pretty much everything except the things that roused their emotions, for which their memories stay the same, or even improve (Psychological Science, vol 19, p 781). Cast your mind back, says Walker, and you will appreciate that almost all of your memories are emotional ones. He thinks this is because emotions act as a red flag for important things that we should be remembering. But, crucially, if you recall them now you don’t re-experience the visceral reaction that you had at the time. Somehow, the brain has retained the memory while stripping away the visceral emotion. Both Stickgold and Walker believe this stripping process occurs during REM sleep.
They note that during REM, production of serotonin and noradrenalin shuts down in the brain. Noradrenalin is the neurochemical associated with stress, fear and the flight response; it translates to adrenalin in the body. Serotonin modulates anger and aggression. “You get this beautiful biological theatre during REM sleep, where the brain can go back over experiences it has learned in days past, but can do so in a situation where there are none of these hyping-up neurochemicals,” Walker says. So although dreams can be highly emotional, he thinks that they gradually erode the emotional edges of memories.
 

Damn I love the human brain. Sometimes, with all this Buddhisty talk about taming the wild horse of the mind, etc., I forget to appreciate what an incredible, adaptive organ the brain is. 
Anyway.
It makes sense that we dream more in times of stress, assuming we’re able to get enough sleep to dream. It makes sense that the collective unconscious (in the Jungian sense – and I’m not convinced this exists/functions in the manner he suggested) would try to process global economic collapse, global warming, endemic conflict, etc., the same way my brain tries to process a new job, a difficult relationship, or painful memories.
What do you think?