For better or worse, our dreams change as we age. I’ve always worked primarily with people over 60 years old, and have had the opportunity to talk about dreams with many of these people, so although I don’t have research statistics to back me up, I have a lot of circumstantial evidence for the kinds of changes we can expect in our dreaming if we live long enough.
It’s commonly recognized that dreams tend to lose some vividness, detail and coherence as we get older, making them more difficult to remember. As dreamers, we might get a bit less motivated to remember them as well, since retaining short-term memories can take more effort in general, and working to track names and dates may already be exhausting some of our patience for this sort of thing. In my current dream groups, there are often only one or two people each time who have dreams they can remember clearly enough to share. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps we’ve learned to get more out of the dreams that do come to us, and we appreciate one another’s dreams as much as our own (something that can’t always be said when we’re young and eager to share our latest breath-taking dream).
The dream content, or the meaning we find in that content, changes as we get older, too. For example, sometimes people in my groups share dreams that involve redefining “meaningful work.” If their waking life careers are behind them, their dreams of being in job situations are more metaphorical than literal: while the work dreams of younger people may focus on resolving problems, making decisions, or rehearsing and replaying scenarios and interactions, older people may dream of workplace issues as representing the ultimate significance and purpose of life itself. Such dreams may be concerned with ethical questions (What is my responsibility toward others? How does the work that I’m doing make a difference?) or existential assessment (How am I handling physical limitations, repeated disappointments, an approaching “termination”?)—or they might create an opening to the spiritual and mysterious aspects of experience (…in the midst of an ordinary workday, the floor dissolves or the ceiling disappears).
The anxiety dreams of elders are often characterized by uncertainty, with scenarios involving disorientation, unfamiliarity, forgetting or being forgotten, whereas a younger dreamer’s anxiety dreams might reflect more concerns about how to act and how others might react. Of course, in waking life as well as in dreams, uncertainty increases as we age, since we must adjust ourselves to the change or loss of some fundamental aspects of our physical, mental and social identities. In dreams, such anxious uncertainty can be intensely disturbing, vaguely weird, or just uncomfortable, but it can also provide an opportunity to discover something that wouldn’t have been discovered otherwise. Being lost in a strange dream city might lead to discovering a skating rink or a flower shop, or having a delightful encounter with a friendly dog (or a dinosaur, for that matter). Deceased parents or long-absent friends might show up with novel solutions to bewildering dilemmas. Dreams show us how confusion can invite creativity, because as we lose access to familiar markers of identity and safety, an open-ended sense of possibility is now required of us.
Death is either a central theme or a gentle subtext in many elders’ dreams. While death in a 20-year-old’s dream is more likely to be a metaphor for a big breakthrough, a big breakthrough in an 80-year-old’s dream might well be a metaphor for death. Mortality in dreams can still feel grim, sad or frightening when you’re old, but it also seems natural, and often evokes curiosity more than resistance. Our dreams allow us to practice death, just as they allow us to practice a lot of other life experiences.
Here’s one of my own typical death-related dreams:
Lights Out: I’m with a group of young people in an apartment. I’m an elder mentor for them, and they see me as a friend, but as they prepare for a trip to the beach they don’t think to invite me. I feel lonely and left out. I ask one woman, “If I’m the last one here, should I turn out all the lights?” I’m really asking so that she’ll notice I haven’t been invited to join them, but she simply takes my request at face value and shows me the lights that will need to be shut off. The only light to be left on is in the bedroom. There’s someone in the large, old fashioned bed. Earlier, I sat in vigil with a very old, dying woman as she faded away and stopped breathing; now, her corpse is still here. The lamp at the bedside will be left on, and apparently someone will come to collect her tomorrow. As we approach the bed, I see that her eyes are open. I’m shocked and a little frightened when her eyes actually follow me. Could she still be alive? The young woman says no, this is just a reflex, and the eyes will close eventually. Then, everybody is gone and I am the only one left. I go around shutting off lights, calling out from time to time in case somebody is still lingering in one of the rooms—but no one answers. Finally, it’s dark and quiet, and I wonder if I should stay for a while and resume my vigil by the dead woman’s bedside, near the one warm light. I hear the hollow ticking of an old clock.
In the dream, I’m trying to understand where I belong: with my younger friends, or with the older, dying and then dead woman. Evidently, I’m closer to belonging with the dead! And yet, I’m not dead myself; there’s still a light on, and I am choosing to remain with that light and in the presence of death—showing respect for both. Perhaps those of us still in the early stages of old age are making that kind of choice. Perhaps, as we explore our somewhat diminished dreams, we are making the most of the life we have now, appreciating each simple image, each humble dream figure, the subtleties of light and darkness. We attend to this vigil at the bedside of the unknown, because each moment that ticks by is a microcosm of an entire lifetime, quietly resonant with meaning.
[This article was originally published in in the Fall, 2024 issue of DreamTime Magazine. If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing to DreamTime by joining the International Association for the Study of Dreams ]
