Dreams and the Sublime

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]The sublime is a mix of two emotions at the same time. Usually a mix of pain and pleasure. Something interesting but something frightening at the same time.

[00:00:10]Something exciting but something that gives you kind of a sense of fear or terror. And to have two emotions at the same time creates this very powerful effect on us physiologically. Dreams have that power as well.

[00:00:28]Well, how is dreaming related to the sublime? There are several times I talk about dreaming. The first way I talk about it is dreams are what we call uncanny. And the idea of the uncanny is very much related to the sublime. And what the uncanny means, it's it's actually comes from Freud is one of the main first people to talk about this. In German, it's the word unheim. It's basically something that is both familiar and not familiar at the same time. It's something that you sense, you know, but you don't know why you know it. Like a classic case would be like a deja vu where you feel like this has happened before, but you don't know exactly what it was. Right? It's a very weird feeling. It's an uncanny feeling.

[00:01:17]And dreams to me are the quintessence of the uncanny in that when you're dreaming it's very strange. It's very weird.

[00:01:26]You're flying through the air. You have a different personality. You're voyaging through cities that never existed. I don't know if this happens to you, but in my dreams there's like this weird geography. There's this bike ride that I can take and I do it over and over again in my dreams. And it's a landscape that doesn't exist. And when I wake up, I'm thinking, where is that? I almost believe that it exists, but it's this kind of weird journey up these different paths where these lakes and ponds and waters. You're creating a geography that's in your mind that is built out of who knows what. At the same time that it's weird, it's oddly familiar, right?

[00:02:07]If dreams were just completely strange, if they were just completely surreal, they wouldn't have any effect on you.

[00:02:14]you wouldn't remember them. But the fact that they're also familiar, that people in there are people that you know, but they're a little bit different than who they normally are, is what makes dreams so compelling. That they are kind of real. They involve real people. They involve memories and experiences you've had and animals and pets you've known, but they're also not what you've ever experienced before. And that mix of the two is very sublime and very strange, right? It's a sense of I kind of know this but I don't really know it. And that is a very powerful effect on our minds. So the sublime creates a kind of strange emotional physical response in people. Neuroscientists have studied this. The sublime is a mix of two emotions at the same time. usually a mix of pain and pleasure. Something interesting but something frightening at the same time. Something exciting but something that gives you kind of a sense of fear or terror. And to have two emotions at the same time creates this very powerful effect on us physiologically. Dreams have that power as well. And the other thing that I talk about in dreaming in the sublime is when you're about to fall asleep, your mind kind of goes to a different place. And I ask you to try and observe that when you're falling asleep, your thoughts start kind of wandering and they start sort of scrambling and falling apart and then you kind of go into that dream state. And if you observe it, it's a feeling that's unlike anything else. And it's a feeling that's actually similar to the the experience of dying because when you're dying, your brain is kind of dying as well. And things are falling apart and and all the constructions of the brain are falling apart. when you're falling asleep, you're going through something similar, right? And then the logic of dreams where everything is kind of scrambled is something similar that happens to the mind in near-death experiences. So dreaming is actually akin to death. It's actually akin to the experience of dying itself. And it is a kind of a nightly form of death that we go through. And it has a lot of emptiness and it has a lot of darkness.

[00:04:34]And we're kind of having intimations of what it's like to die. And so I link the sublime and dreaming up in those two ways to a sense of the uncanny and to the sense of that sensation of our consciousness breaking down.