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Everyone from Martin Luther King and Walt Disney to John Lennon and H. P. Lovecraft have expounded on the power and importance of dreams.
Many people the world over presently feel like we live in a world of lost and broken dreams.
It seems like the whole world's becoming increasingly mean, selfish, frightened, needy, angry, cruel, stupid, unhappy, and unimaginative, and the plague just seems to be spreading.
What if the problem really is within us?
For many years now, I've had barely any...
...and indeed, my life, my mind, and everything about me have been steadily deteriorating.
Can anyone else attest to similar? If so, for how long, and can you think of what else might have changed, either as cause or symptom? Likewise, if anyone has experienced this and managed to recover, HOW???
If "dream loss" is really a contemporary epidemic somehow, it might explain SO MUCH.
A big part of it is choosing to sleep. The world tries to put a ton of demands on us, and one of them is to avoid sleep.
Sleep is for the weak.
I'll sleep when I'm dead.
Our brains aren't designed for electronic devices. Certain wave lengths of light tell your brain "It's time to be awake!" can even be perceived by people with certain kinds of blindness. Someone who has completely lost the connection between their eyes and brain will have a very irregular sleep/wake pattern, while someone who has only lost the standard vision, but has eyes that are still connected will have a much easier ability to maintain a day/night schedule because their brain still gets information from the presence of sunlight.
The Information Age has created such a plethora of information that internet media companies have realized they aren't necessarily competing for your money, but rather they are competing for your time. If they can get you to spend time on their website, the money will follow. There are only so many hours in the day, and if you want to "win" as a business, you need to scoop up as many hours from your customers as possible. This means what you see is intended to grab and hold your attention. When a show grabs you, you binge watch it instead of sleeping. Very few companies profit off of your sleep.
I would definitely buy the lack of sleep/dreaming as a factor to how the world is now. Dreaming is super important to our brain's function, so it would mean we aren't functioning the way we've evolved to work anymore. Our bodies might catch up at some point, but that could take a few thousand years.
I think another major factor is the massive complexity of our world, and our increased understanding of it. We know more about the world than we ever have before, but we know so much that it is impossible for one person to know all of it. Catholic priests of the past kept people unable to read the Bible by keeping it in Latin, but now scientists have learned so much that they can't teach it to us if they wanted to (or can only teach the surface layer, and not full understanding).
Our brain isn't functioning at optimum levels (dreaming) at a time when it is so important that we are able to use it to it's fullest (too much available information).
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Funny thing is, I don't think I, for one, have a "sufficient quantity of sleep" problem. Nobody's forcing me to sleep less. I don't know offhand how many hours I get, but I usually "wake up" naturally, in contrast to "getting woken up". My schedule is atypical, but not extraordinarily so.
Nonetheless, it's hardly a "D&D rest" that I get; in fact, for the past few weeks in particular, I've reliably been waking up deeply and exceptionally depressed - I'm severely depressed all the time, mind you, and have been for several years, but recently it's been most acute within the first hour of waking up.