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> Children jump around at the end of the day, to expend the last of that day’s energy. The adult equivalent, when the sun goes down, is to create or witness dra

> Children jump around at the end of the day, to expend the last of that day’s energy. The adult equivalent, when the sun goes down, is to create or witness drama—which is to say, to order the universe into a comprehensible form. Our sundown play/ film/ gossip is the day’s last exercise of that survival mechanism. In it we attempt to discharge any residual perceptive energies in order to sleep. I've often heard dreams described in the same terms, that they are a sort of garbage collection / filing system that orders our day into a comprehensible form. But this is the first time I've made the connection between dreams and to "create or witness drama." When I watch a movie or chat online or play a video game, in a significant way I'm living a waking dream, meta to the essential business of life. But if drama and dreams do overlapping work, do people who engage in drama need less REM sleep? It doesn't seem so. Maybe they need even more, to process the drama. Maybe the additional processing pays off with additional growth. Experiencing a thousand dramas gives one more social insight, flexibility and resilience than otherwise. A thousand dreams could do the same. It's fair to describe fiction, or even art, as technology for sharing dreams.

spython 5y ago
I'd expand that storytelling is not only sharing dreams, but also acts in a way as a collective psychotherapy. You let go of the events of the past day and re-align with the hero of the story. Whatever you experienced that day, the hero (mostly) has it worse. The bad guys in stories are punished, or will be punished in the afterlife. The evening sitcoms are so popular exactly because they are safe in their predictability but offer slight variations to cover a variety of topics. At the same time, if the narrative is incomplete or stirs up emotions, it will not let you sleep well and will leave an imprint over time. If the bad guys in the stories are not punished, it remains up to you, the individual, to punish them. If you are born in a society that suffers war and you see that your people were not able to protect themselves, it would feel natural to you as a child to step in and punish the bad guys. If you hear stories of unmitigated injustice carried out against your people, you will find yourself preparing to fight. This is how radicalization works, through stories of unmitigated injustice. This is why echo chambers are so dangerous – they never offer stories of protection and redress for the perceived injustices, but only heighten the sense of danger and defenselessness, up to the point where conspiracy theories begin to seem plausible. This is why we should be mindful of what information and 'news' we consume. And this why we need stories of justice, of 'evil' being punished, now more than ever.

spython 5y ago

I'd expand that storytelling is not only sharing dreams, but also acts in a way as a collective psychotherapy. You let go of the events of the past day and re-align with the hero of the story. Whatever you experienced that day, the hero (mostly) has it worse. The bad guys in stories are punished, or will be punished in the afterlife. The evening sitcoms are so popular exactly because they are safe in their predictability but offer slight variations to cover a variety of topics. At the same time, if the narrative is incomplete or stirs up emotions, it will not let you sleep well and will leave an imprint over time. If the bad guys in the stories are not punished, it remains up to you, the individual, to punish them. If you are born in a society that suffers war and you see that your people were not able to protect themselves, it would feel natural to you as a child to step in and punish the bad guys. If you hear stories of unmitigated injustice carried out against your people, you will find yourself preparing to fight. This is how radicalization works, through stories of unmitigated injustice. This is why echo chambers are so dangerous – they never offer stories of protection and redress for the perceived injustices, but only heighten the sense of danger and defenselessness, up to the point where conspiracy theories begin to seem plausible. This is why we should be mindful of what information and 'news' we consume. And this why we need stories of justice, of 'evil' being punished, now more than ever.