Dreams as Social Glue

While scientists don’t agree on a single unified reason why we dream, it is unequivocal that dreams help us regulate our emotions. Dreaming can serve as a sort of “overnight therapy” that is played out during Rapid Eye Movement Sleep. In fact, in this REM Sleep, the emotional centers in our brain are more active than at any point in our waking lives.

Dreaming helps us regulate our own emotions, and in doing so it can help us to be better in our relationships with others - family, friends, colleagues, and even our adversaries or the people who get under our skin.

What is perhaps less well-known is that sharing our dreams with others can also enhance social connection and empathy in our relationships. This is known as the Empathy Theory of Dreaming.1

This perspective on dreaming suggests that paying attention to our dreams and sharing them in community can enhance our social-emotional intelligence. Harvard psychiatrist Edward Pace-Schott describes dreams as a kind of "storytelling instinct,2" where the brain spins memories, emotions, and social dynamics into complex narratives. This process allows us to simulate interactions, test out different behaviors, and gain insights into our relationships—all without real-world consequences.

This ability is linked to the medial prefrontal cortex, the brain region responsible for perspective-taking and understanding others’ emotions. When we dream, this area is highly active, and it enables us to step into different roles and view situations from multiple perspectives3. This is also known as theory of mind, and it allows us to experiment with social scenarios in a way that strengthens our emotional intelligence in waking life.

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage our emotions while also being attuned to the emotions of others. High Emotional Intelligence is linked to stronger relationships, better communication, and increased resilience.

Professionally, studies have shown that individuals with high Emotional Intelligence outperformed those with low Emotional Intelligence in job performance and leadership effectiveness.

In personal life, individuals with higher Emotional Intelligence tend to navigate challenges with greater ease, maintaining deeper and more meaningful relationships.

By sharing dreams with others, we can develop key Emotional Intelligence skills such as empathy, self-awareness, and emotional regulation.

It’s fascinating how little we talk about our dreams, despite experiencing them (though not always remembering them) every night. Most people wake up, shrug off or immediately forget the bizarre, emotional, or even profound journeys we’ve taken, and enter our day as if this outrageous thing had never even happened.

There’s this old episode of Third Rock from the Sun where a group of aliens living in human bodies pretending to be a human family each dream for the very first time. It freaks them out, and they each believe they are going crazy.

The leader of the group, the High Commander says,

Have any of you ever had your sleep invaded by scary and almost metaphorical images you can't control?

It isn’t until his human girlfriend, Jane, shares her own dream that he finally comes to learn that this is a normal experience for humans and the gang just barely avoid having to leave earth indefinitely to get their human brains repaired.

Just like in the (outdated, but still funny to me) show, our dreams offer a hidden language of emotions, anxieties, and aspirations that often go unspoken and unacknowledged. By ignoring this nightly phenomenon, we miss a crucial opportunity for self-reflection, social connection, and growth.

To explore this potential, I would love you to participate in Night School’s first community dream-sharing experience! We’ll use a simple yet powerful framework for dream sharing that you can bring into your own relationships—whether with family, friends, or broader communities.

This will be a donation-based event open to all interested in engaging in meaningful discussions about our dreams, bring mindfulness into the dreaming experience, cultivate some awareness of our subconscious minds, and develop deeper emotional intelligence.

Join us here on Monday March 24, at 8pm ET. We’ll cap the total participants at 20 to begin, so sign up while slots last.

Dreams are important and useful.

By embracing and sharing them, we can strengthen our own emotional intelligence and build stronger bonds in our communities.

Hope to see you there!

Eric