Most parents will remember sleepless nights with young children. Beth now has a toddler and a new born. Without finding routine, sleep can go out the window entirely, and the lessons from her first child have been important this time round.

Beth is busy - running her own business alongside childcare, there’s always something going on. Stress shows up a form of pressure - a social pressure - ‘who you are, who you’ve built yourself up to be - running a business, having a family, having friendships, while also taking care of children, and doing that all on limited sleep.’

It’s letting go of these expectations that seems to be grounding. Just to get on with what life throws at you.

Beth’s dream world is vivid - she’s always had dramatic dreams that take her through multiple scenarios. Her dreams run her through her anxieties - and also express her hopes and joys.

Working as a creative freelancer means intense periods, sometimes running from one job straight into another. And that can build up, until you reach the point of burnout. Hitting that point was an experience that Tomas didn’t want to repeat.

‘I think I get so engrossed in things, that I don’t always realise I’m stressed. And that’s what’s kept me going. I’m sure it keeps everyone going, to feed off adrenaline, that stress gives you. So my body sometimes does just raise a little red flag and go, you’ve got another ulcer on your lip. You need to sort this out. And then if I don’t, I get another five.’

It was his body, then, that first let him know that something had to change. The relaxation - the rituals, the weekend baths - are all part of forming a routine to redress the balance against stress, and reconnect with the physical self.

In the modern world, genuine physical reconnection feels needed. So much has moved online - friendships, relationships, all through instant messaging as a method of maintaining contact. With loss to public services - closing down of swimming pools and community spaces - pushing this forwards.

Exhale. Sometimes the best thing to do is to make time for rest.

‘I found this Turkish barber that like, wraps my face in a Eucalyptus-drenched face towel. And gives me a facial. And it’s just insane, it’s like, best experience, just totally float away from your issues. And the funny thing is, I didn’t even realise I could get this service for the first three appointments, but it’s actually free. You just have to ask. So that was a revelation, and I will always be going back.’

Returning and returning again to calm and to the body - to seek out peace in a fragmented world.

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Yuki is originally from Japan and when she was working there, she got caught up in the work culture which became the priority for her. She found herself working long hours on multiple projects to the point of burnout.

Since then, she re-evaluated her relationship with work. She quit the job that was causing so much stress, had a break and then thought more about her work life balance.

Now she knows her signals better and can manage her limits, so she doesn’t lose so much sleep.

Joe, a multi-instrumentalist based in London, hasn’t always slept particularly well. As a teenager, he’d listen to music before bed to help him get to sleep. He went on to try various kinds of sleep music, but they weren’t really working for him.

So he started making his own music. Looping the sounds of the pedal steel guitar to create ethereal soundscapes that soothe the mind.

When lockdown happened, the world shut down. After years of touring as a session musician, Joe now had - time. He wrote new music. And started doing live streams of his pedal steel compositions at night, improvised while watching the international space station camera, a 24/7 live stream from space facing back down at earth. In deepest lockdown, a stressful time for many, people tuned in.

He had found a way to connect with others, through the sleepless night.

In her second year of studies, however, something bad happened. She had a spell of dizziness, followed by a panic attack which ended up with her being taken to hospital. She sat with her mum as the doctor told them both the diagnosis. ‘“Your daughter has anxiety”,’ the doctor said. And I was like, “what?”’. Anxiety was something new. Shy as a child, yes, sometimes. But she’d never thought of anxiety. It was a relief to at least know that there wasn’t something else going on. Then, the insomnia started.

The insomnia became a regular feature in Lysa’s life. Eventually, she would crash and sleep would return. She had just brought her sleep back under control again when, in 2020, lockdown hit. A time that, for most people, was anxiety-inducing. Lysa was having constant problems with not being able to sleep. Before long, the insomnia was affecting her body and mind. ‘It was like, in the day, I was walking on clouds. It was like I was watching myself walk places. My body felt light because of the lack of sleep.’

In a strange way, it was secretly enjoyable to not be able to sleep. In deepest lockdown, Lysa turned her wakeful nights into a time for creativity and reflection. She would sit on her roof as the sun rose. ‘Some of my favourite songs were written during that time, my single was written in those nights.’

‘I’d send my friends videos, Tiktoks, that they’d watch when they woke up. And it was entertaining for them, to see what was going on in my brain at 3am.’

‘Once I did a full hair and make up look in the night, and fell asleep, and then in the morning my dad was knocking on my university door, because we had to take the key back, and I was just like, hello? But that wasn’t weird to me then, because I’d just given up about being upset about it. I was just like let’s see how many things I can do before the sun comes up, kind of vibe.’

Some things helped with sleep, like podcasts. Other things didn’t. ‘Whale music? That never worked for me.’ Sometimes she’d go to sleep and wake up, only to realise she’d only been asleep for two hours. ‘The longest I went without sleep was when I went to get my nails done, in the run up to Christmas. And I was sat in the chair, and I was going in and out of my body, and looking at the clock, and counting backwards and thinking - oh, no. And it had been nearly 48 hours without sleep.’

With time, Lysa’s insomnia subsided. ‘I see not sleeping more as a symptom, now. Like, before I didn’t even realise that people could not sleep, I didn’t know that was a thing. I find the methods that work, and I try and stick to them. It works itself out, in the end.’

Insomnia symptoms affect roughly 1 in 3 adults worldwide. It’s a huge issue. How do we move through the world without sleep?

I was curious about stress, anxiety and rest. I was aware that when I felt stressed, like during a transition period, it put pressure on my sleep. Sleep is this private and personal part of our lives. I wanted to know more. How do we experience stress in our bodies? How does stress impact sleep for different people? I carried out a series of phone calls and in person interviews with some amazing people whose personal experiences shed light on my questions.

When I started the project, I noticed how much we talk about sleep in the day to day. I would hear people talking about how tired they are, or how badly they slept. We seem to have a fascination with sleep, yet undervalue it on a societal level. Then, asking people about their dreams in interviews formed a way in to the conversations. Tapping into that part of ourselves creates an intimacy and a curiosity from which we can explore our stories.

The stories I recorded are about sleep, or lack of it. They’re about dreaming, and burnout. I’ve been looking through the multiple connections between the stories. In the end it seems that what holds the stories together is an understanding of the stresses we all experience. And how we respond creatively to challenges in our lives, whether chronic insomnia or life-changing illness.

I’m interested in dreams and sleep as a creative space. And how we can claim that in a fast-paced world.

The format of the project is a series of articles, with audio edits attached where you can listen to the story in first-person. If you like the stories, please subscribe and follow along. I will publish a new article aiming for every two weeks. I’ll send an update if I think I need more time between each article.

I hope you find something in the stories, in the beautiful voices of the people I spoke to, that resonates, and that speaks to a shared human experience.

Thank you to everyone I interviewed, for sharing their stories with me!

Enjoy. And let me know what you think, in the comments, or write back.

Love from Hannah x

The dreams themselves are just out of reach. For some of us, we think we dream vaguely, the mix of subconscious ideas, recollections and images just out of reach. For others, the dream world is a vivid space.

For Amber, at one time the dream world was as much of a reality as her daily life.

Amber dreams frequently. Every night she finds herself in worlds that resemble daily life but are different in some way. Buildings extend outwards into MC-Esher-like staircases, she finds herself in places she can recognise, talking to people she knows - sometimes even celebrities - everything is like the real world, but slightly off in some way.

When Amber was young, she used to experience night terrors. Horrible images appeared to her and woke her up in the night. Her friends died, her arms fell off. ‘I never questioned, how come these things keep happening in the dreams, but in real life, my friends are just fine?’ The adults around her weren’t talking about dreams that much. Her understanding of what reality was and what dreaming was were close to each other. Both these spaces were real to her.

To escape her night terrors, Amber discovered she could blink rapidly, and wake herself up from the dream. Whenever she realised she was in a horrible dream she wanted to escape, she would blink until she found herself back in the darkness of the night, restored to her conscious body and free of the monsters.

However, after a while, ‘the blinking stopped working. And I was just trapped in my dream anyway’.

Amber needed another way to free herself of her terrifying dream world. Through the blinking, she had learnt to recognise when she was dreaming. So she started to influence the dream world around her. ‘I would be running across a rooftop, away from a monster, and I’d get to the edge of the rooftop and think, well, what if I just had wings right now, and I could fly away from the problem?’

With that, Amber had taught herself to lucid dream.

From there, the dreams became something she could change and mould. But with every attempt to influence the dream world, the dream would fight back. ‘It was like the dream had turned into Lego. But if I wanted to control the dream, the dream would fight back tenfold.’ Roads would shift away as she tried to reach a given destination. Sometimes in the dream, ‘I’d get hungry. So I’d manifest a shop, but then in the shop they’d never have the snack I want. It was like the dream was trying to constantly inconvenience me.’ It’s hard not to sense the dream world having a life of its own.

Amber’s experience of lucid dreaming has changed in recent years. She still dreams, every night. But what has changed is how she responds to the dreams. She tries to control them less than before. ‘Even last night, I dreamt that I was walking through a pit of snakes. At first, I was scared, but then I thought, well, what if it was just sticks, not a pit of snakes, and I can go peacefully.’

‘I think it’s meant I’m quite relaxed in daily life. That I can’t control everything.’

The dream world may operate on a different plane, but it can teach us about our approach to daily life, too.

But are we losing that connection, that awareness of our roles within the group, the ones that resonate with who we are? Our society can make us feel like we can do everything on our own, despite the reality of us being entirely dependent on others for almost everything, especially in cities, from driving the train to buying food at the supermarket.

Dreams point to our collective nature. It’s something that binds our worlds together. Sleep is not something we can ‘do without’. Is there value in re-instating its worth, spiritual and practical?

Dreams are a mirror. They are like clues. Breadcrumbs. Another form of becoming sensitive to the world. What happens if we tune into the hints they give us?

The following series of articles will be exploring the questions of how we relate to each other, and to ourselves, through examining our sleep.