The Dream-Lag Effect

and a magic doge visitation

Toward the end of last year, I stopped by my favorite coffee spot and met a marvelous dog named Fred. Keenly observant, ready to roll over for belly rubs at a moment’s notice, squirming with affection for anyone who dared to make eye contact—Fred was a whimsical bodhisattva in Golden Retriever form. 

His owner, Mac, told me the story of how they found each other: One busy workday years ago, Mac randomly deviated from his to-do list and stopped by the Burbank pound, where he saw Fred. Only a tiny puppy then, Fred had been abandoned at the pound’s front door a week before. Unsurprisingly, he’d become super popular, and the pound was running a highly competitive raffle to determine his new home. The front desk guy said to Mac, hey why don’t you sign up? On a lark he did, and through one of those miracles of providence the next day he won. Anyway, there sat Fred as we chatted, his tail whisking the concrete floor, delighted, pure presence with dark eyes and honey-blonde locks. Just the most epically good-natured Golden Retriever I’d had the pleasure of petting.

Six nights later, I dreamed I was given a Golden Retriever named Fred. For some peculiar dream-reason, never explained, his name was being changed to Trevor. He looked in every respect like the doge I’d met at coffee, except for a reddish tint to his fur, and his spine, which protruded from his back in a long, curved, knobby ridge of silver. He jumped up onto the bench of a picnic table where I was sitting. Haunches down, head at my shoulder, he leaned into me with a quiet, warm touch. The heart of the dream was the experience: the feeling of Fred/Trevor leaning into me, radiating playfulness, spilling delight everywhere as if it were a sheer substance, and I was soaked.

A dog, a picnic table, the spine, silver and gold, a gift—these are hyperlinks in the lacy web of my dreams. They intertwine from time to time with other nouns and qualities, going back for years. I’d never seen these bundled in one dream together, the mix surprised me. I won’t dig into how they all connect, I’d have to explain how many times I’ve been hospitalized for an extremely rare spinal condition, and that’d be a different story.

Giving a fine doge some pets over coffee was a lovely waking life moment, but kinda forgettable and surface level, like experiential topsoil. Yet the dream about it hit me to the core. I woke up and walked around in a golden haze for a few days, inexplicably warmed from within by a gift I can hardly articulate. My unconscious seemed to have said, ah yes, something nice happened here. Let’s fold this new experience into our dreamer’s mysterious, ongoing life-plot, advance the action one more step, and write it to the hard disk. And the dream picked up what it liked of this ever so playful, good-natured relational pattern, then inscribed it with deep cuts into my neurological, emotional, and spiritual being.

This spring, many months post-retriever-dream, I read The Encyclopedia of Dreams Volume 1 from cover to cover, which means I now have a pretty solid grasp of dream topics beginning with the letters A through L, but not beyond that, because Volume 2 is out of print. I mean, the title could not sound more dry, but the book’s articles were often (tho not always) chock full of treasure. 

In the D’s, I came across the “dream-lag effect” for the first time. I don’t know about you, but many folks I’ve read and talked with have assumed that when dreams relate to waking-life events, they most frequently reference the prior day. But research has shown instead that remembered events, such as my Fredly encounter, pop up in just as high a concentration 5-7 days later. Of course you can dream of happenings a month after they occur, decades hence, or whatever your unconscious pleases, but there seems to be a measurable peak at a week. And especially for Personally Relevant Stuff, with some mix of spatial, social, and emotional problem solving, one is quite likely to catch a dream that references a memory from 5-7 days back. 

I thought of my retriever visitation, and how it had puzzled me that I’d dreamt it not right after, but on exactly the 6th night post-pets.

The dream-lag effect appears to reflect an underlying process by which our memories are moved from short-term into long-term memory, from the hippocampus into neocortical structures. As with all things dreaming, we are left with more questions than answers. The effect was first described by Michel Jouvet, a theorist and researcher who, in the late 1970s, observed it while recording his own dreams. Of course dreams aren’t only about memory reconsolidation. Like, it would be wildly misguided to reduce an entire state of consciousness to a mere single function. 

If I learned anything from reading The Encyclopedia of Dreams, it’s that the history of dreaming majorly overlaps the history of healing. Fresh modalities for healing via dreamwork have been springing up for literal millennia: Across Ancient Greece, the sick flocked to hundreds of temples devoted to Asclepius, wherein dreams were ritually induced for just about any type of healing—and via Hippocrates, a follower of Asclepius, Western medicine evolved from this dreams-as-conduit-to-healing origin. A lesser-known, more recent modality, Embodied Imagination, was developed by Robert Bosnak in the 1970s, after he found that working with dreams could produce lasting physical changes. One of Bosnak’s patients—a man suffering from AIDS-induced facial droop and a partially immobilized upper body—regained his range of motion “after entering the subjective experience of a crease in a jacket he had dreamed about.” 

Sounds nuts, how could that be real? Well, a bunch of very special circumstances align when you drop into REM sleep: The volume knob on your frontolateral cortex turns way down (inhibiting the linear-logical thought we associate with waking states). At the same time, the limbic structures deep within your brain super-engage (providing access to emotional patterns and content you typically can’t reach when awake) plus a bunch of other brainiac stuff I’d need another essay to unpack. And in the midst of this swirl, your heart has a freaky lil dance party. Waking from a nightmare, many folks notice their heart rate is elevated—that’s not just a result of, say, rocking up to middle school in your underpants, it’s a feature of all REM dreaming, across the board. In fact, mid-REM dream your brain and heart are often more active than when you’re awake.

Because when we REM-dream, we’re being changed. 

So, what was my doge-induced change? End of October last year I was in a rough state, skittish and ptsd-shy. Then I went to a coffee shop and met an abandoned puppy who’d grown into a miraculously happy-home, joyful doge. In the moment, I didn’t catch how much I resonated emotionally with Fred’s story, Golden good-nature and the hope of his arc, it would have slipped away.

It came back six nights later. In a way I hadn’t experienced before, in that dream I knew loyalty, affection, and kind, loving presence. Really knew, and received them as a gift that endures. My spine has been a world of brain-melting pain, and is still a pain-koan I suffer daily like the most junior zen monk—my magic dream-canine seemed to wear it as jewelry, inside-out, with no damp to his enthusiasm. I’m still learning from that part. It was just one moment, one dream among the many tens of thousands I’ve had. But lingering, inscribed in heart-memory, sketching new potential with its sheen. And in my experience, that is how real—though often slight, slow, and not very sexy—day-in-day-out change tends to unfold.

The dream-lag effect appears to reflect a rhythmic, time-delay process whereby special stuff gets encoded into our autonomic nervous system, i.e. our unconscious, i.e. that deeply felt, knowing-gestalt of the world and ourselves we’ve assembled over our lifetimes from a zillion such processed experiences. I think that’s worth dwelling on.

These days we seem to be spawning ever-more vocab terms for our dysfunctions, but far fewer for authentic experiences of healing. The dl-effect points to a still understudied, kinda major channel by which healing can take place (and, um, has been for centuries). Of course not all dream-lags and REM-dreams are explicitly about healing, but I’ll bet you big there’s at least a sliver of healing in far more dreams than we assume at first glance. And that’s an understatement. Just look at what the crease in a jacket can do.

Now when I have a particularly searing dream, I check events of the prior day, but I also poke around in my journal 5-7 days back, or more. It’s nice to zoom out, to look at what I’m really learning, and how these new sedimentary layers are being written to my core. Who knows what other rhythmic cycles are at work. We’re all out here surfing waves. As the author Dennis Covington once said: Mystery is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can understand.

Preview image: Jupiter’s Aurora via NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope