Dreams is one of the themes that runs through Nectar of Time. Below is everything in the Nectarium that touches on it.
Where it comes up 11
Within this theme 62
Concepts 14
- Lucid dreaming
Becoming aware you are dreaming while in the dream. Samantha uses dream signs (a broken clock, limited range of motion) to wake up in the dream, and follows Charlie Morley's approach of…
- Sleep as surrender
Samantha's central claim: sleep is the ultimate surrender. You can only fall asleep if your body feels safe, so trouble falling asleep reflects a hyperactive, fearful nervous system and a…
- Precognitive dreams
Dreams that come true. Tamir has had dreams come true 'pixel for pixel' months later; Samantha regularly dreams that someone will reach out and they do. She explains it as tuning, like a…
- Anima
Jung's archetype of the feminine within a man. Tamir argues Murakami's thinly drawn women are anima figures, messengers who lead the protagonist to something mostly within himself.
- Imagined walls
Samantha's metaphor: as in dreams, where we hallucinate a wall that isn't there, in waking life we hallucinate limits. Once clients break one or two, they see all the walls (money…
- Sleep paralysis
Waking in mind while the body remains in sleep atonia. Samantha calls it one of the most terrifying experiences she has had, like 'surfing two planes at the same time', and notes…
- Daydreaming
Tamir suggests daydreams can be more powerful than night dreams because we believe them; Samantha adds that most daydreams are catastrophizing worst-case scenarios we give power to just…
- Dream torture
Tamir's idea, sparked by The Redemption of Time: the most severe torture would be to 'waterboard someone's mind' by making them dream their worst fear over and over. Samantha: it only has…
- Dream totem
A reality check that signals you are dreaming. Samantha's are a clock or watch that doesn't work properly and running without getting anywhere (limited range of motion).
- Dreams as a virtual reality headset
Tamir's realization mid-conversation: while we build VR environments like the Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro for training, we already own the best virtual reality headset, our dreams…
- Effective dreaming
From The Lathe of Heaven: dreams that literally change reality on waking (Tamir's example: you dream Texas is in Africa and wake to find it there). Used as the extreme version of the idea…
- Death practice
Tamir and Samantha wonder what it would be like if our relationship to death were like waking up from a dream. Tamir says a death practice comes late in the journey and many never get to…
- Time dilation in sleep
Tamir observes that naps break our temporal sense: a three-hour nap can feel like three months, a 30-minute nap like three days, and anesthesia makes hours of surgery feel like a minute. He…
- Witching hour
The roughly midnight-to-3 a.m. window. Samantha says it is partly lack of distraction and partly less 'energetic disturbance', since most people are in delta-wave sleep rather than…
Books 11
- Think and Grow Rich
Tamir notes that this popular business book has a chapter on dreaming in which Hill describes dreams and imagined meetings with mentors such as Thomas Edison and a U.S. president, and…
- Bible
Cited for Joseph's dreams and his interpretation of Pharaoh's dreams, which saved his life and made him second-in-command in Egypt. Tamir's example of how much ancient cultures valued…
- Sleep
Murakami story about a woman who stops sleeping for weeks. Samantha read it while she herself was struggling to sleep and with a protagonist her age; it shook her out of self-absorbed…
- The Lathe of Heaven
1971 science-fiction novel about George Orr, a Portland man whose 'effective dreams' change reality, and the psychiatrist who exploits them. Tamir opens the episode by reading its jellyfish…
- The Three-Body Problem
Liu Cixin's sci-fi trilogy (Remembrance of Earth's Past), which Tamir strongly recommends in print or audiobook. He brings it up for its idea of dreams as the most severe form of torture…
- Childhood (Hesse poem)
Poem Tamir reads ('My farthest valley... O dark gate, O dark hour of death, come forth') about longing for death as a return home to one's dreams; Mia hears in it someone letting themselves…
- Creative Dreaming
A dream-control book Tamir picked up at a random used bookstore in California. He hasn't fully read it, but reads its back cover's big promises: lovemaking with a partner of your choice…
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Samantha recalls the King's Cross scene where Harry, near death, meets the dead Dumbledore and asks if it is a dream; Dumbledore says being in your head doesn't make it not real. She also…
- Hermann Hesse poem on night
Tamir paraphrases a Hesse poem in which the speaker fears the night, when the quiet forces you to face your fears, and longs to lie in a sunlit field before he can dream of the night.
- The Forgotten Language
Fromm's 1951 book on dreams, fairy tales and myths, the likely source of the cold-open line that we are wiser and capable of better judgment asleep than awake.
- The Redemption of Time
Fan-written fourth book of the Three-Body saga, officially blessed by Liu Cixin, that answers fans' questions. Tamir alludes to its treatment of the brain sent to space (Yun Tianming) to…
People 7
- Haruki Murakami
Japanese novelist and one of Tamir's favourite authors, who brought him back to fiction. Grant thinks he is wildly overrated, 'the Stephen King of Japanese literature', and dislikes his…
- Samantha Chung
Life coach, mindset and manifestation expert and podcast host (Simplifying Sam) who does what she calls 'thought work', helping clients see the imagined walls that block them. Tamir met her…
- Carl Jung
Swiss psychiatrist; Tamir says Hesse and Jung were neighbours and friends, which shows in Hesse's work, as an example of novelists absorbing non-fiction knowledge.
- Hermann Hesse
German-Swiss novelist (Siddhartha, Steppenwolf). Tamir read him as philosophical fiction; Tamir says Hesse knew Carl Jung and that Jung's influence shows in his writing.
- Swami Sarvapriyananda
Likely the speaker of the cold-open clip about a lion in a dream: inside the dream there's no logical answer to where the lion came from, because the real answer is to wake up. The clip…
- Charlie Morley
British lucid-dreaming teacher and author. Samantha says the first lucid-dreaming book she read was by him and that she uses his process: create a totem, then face the worst thing you can…
- Joseph
Biblical dreamer and dream interpreter who became vizier of Egypt by interpreting Pharaoh's dreams. Tamir: whether or not it happened, the cultural value placed on dreams is immense.
Quotes 13
Wake up in the dream, figure out what your totem is, and figure out that you're awake. And then when you're awake, do the scariest possible thing you could ever do, and then realize you don't die, or realize that it's okay, or realize that you're safe.
The reason these women are sort of written in a shallow way is because they're not actually women, are they? These are Jungian animas.
The best fiction-making machine that we have is our mind when we go to sleep at night. You're building worlds and stories every single night, and a novel is just that same thing in a pill format.
Just by asking for it presupposes that it's there. Just by you doing that, you birth an answer. You may not know what the answer is, but you birth the existence of one.
We don't know what happens when we die. But imagine if the experience or relationship we had to death was like waking up.
We never disconnect from the field of information that is this universe. Just like a radio, we can tune in, and in our dreamlike state we tune to different stations than we can tune into when we're awake.
In dreams we hallucinate that there's a wall there, but there's not really a wall there. We're just dreaming that there's a wall there, and we do that in waking life too.
Perhaps the best answer to the question 'do dreams predict the future?' is a cautious, limited kind of yes. Dreams express our wishes and feelings, wishes and feelings motivate behavior, and behavior shapes the future.
Whatever is happening in our dreams is happening inside of us, inside of what we conceive as the world. So I think we're essentially saying: blur the line between asleep and awake. It's all your life.
Bad dreams, much like good dreams, just show you what you're not willing to look at. We lie to ourselves all the time. Their dreams will tell them how they really feel.
We are not only less reasonable and less decent in our dreams, but we are also more intelligent, wiser, and capable of better judgment when we're asleep than when we're awake.
We're building this virtual reality environment in many cases for training, where we have our own virtual reality, the best virtual reality headset, just by closing our eyes.
What we truly want competes with what we're taught to want. But in the dream world we don't have as much access to what the conscious mind has been taught to want. We just get to want what we really want.
Insights 3
- Dreams are the safest arena for fear
The conscious mind blocks certain emotions such as fear, but in dreams those defenses are down. A lucid dream lets you walk straight into a fear you could never safely recreate in waking…
- In dreams only feeling is real
Identity is something we hallucinate and agree to while awake. In the dream it dissolves, and what remains real is what we feel. We feel more at night because we are less distracted.
- Discounting dreams is a modern habit
From Joseph in Egypt to the Oracle of Delphi to Samantha's own grandmother, dreams were long treated as significant. Dismissing them as meaningless is historically very recent.
Practices 3
- Ask your dreams a question
Before sleep, describe a problem to your dreamer self in detail ('my problem with my business is this; help me see it another way') and set an intention to receive an answer. Asking…
- Dream journaling
Write down your dreams every morning and track recurring symbols (Samantha's included tsunamis, fire, tornadoes, broken glass, car crashes and particular people) as clues to what you truly…
- Set a dream totem
Pick reality checks that reveal you are dreaming: look for a clock or watch (they don't behave normally in dreams) or notice limited motion, like running without getting anywhere. When you…
Stories 11
- Lucid dream in the grocery store
Seeing a broken clock, Samantha realized she was dreaming and began knocking things off the shelves. Someone hooded her and drove her in a van to a Dumbledore-like figure, who said 'you…
- Facing the mental hospital in a dream
Samantha shares, for the first time anywhere, her deepest fear: being committed to a psychiatric hospital and disbelieved. She deliberately dreamt being taken there against her will and…
- Murakami story as homework
Within hours of meeting Samantha at his studio, Tamir gave her Murakami's 'Sleep' from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman as homework due the next week. She took it as a sign from the universe…
- Dreams that come true
Tamir has dreamt events that happened 'pixel for pixel' up to three months later. Samantha often wakes knowing a specific person will reach out, and when they do, they say they just 'got…
- Guard rails in lucid dreams
Both have noticed that when they become lucid and start controlling a dream, something in the dream becomes aware of it and signals 'you're not supposed to be doing that.' Tamir notes the…
- Book club turned Tamir to fiction
About four and a half years earlier, during COVID, Tamir joined a book club and set his non-fiction aside. Most of the novels were 'pretty cool' but changed nothing; Murakami was the one…
- Naps that feel like months
Tamir describes a deep three-hour nap that felt like living three months, Samantha a 30-minute nap that felt like three days, and Tamir notes surgery patients feeling hours pass as a minute…
- The lion in the dream
In the cold-open clip, a teacher asks where a lion chasing you in a dream came from. The true answer is that there is no lion: wake up. If you insist on an answer inside the dream, you get…
- The six-foot housefly dream
While washing dishes, Tamir will suddenly recall, with no trigger, a dream from 20+ years ago, such as a childhood dream of a six-foot housefly chasing him around Yaletown. It happens with…
- "It's just a dream"
As a child Samantha felt her dreams were deeply important and would tell her mother about them, sometimes overcome with emotion, only to hear 'it's just a dream, don't worry about it.'…
- Grandmother the dream interpreter
Samantha's grandmother interpreted dreams for the family, and her mother still knows the symbols ('Mom, I dreamt about an egg, what does that mean?'). Samantha's evidence that discounting…