The Feeling of Having Dreamt, Without A Dream
Such a strange, yet potentially soulful experience
Last night in the middle of the night, I awoke to the feeling that I had just been inside a very long and rich dream. There were no images to accompany this feeling; no characters or names. There was no narrative around the dream at all; no story for me to latch onto or try to recall. However, as I noted in my dream journal, I was “awash in feeling.”
In the past, and sometimes still, this feeling without words would frustrate me; induce me to try even harder to remember the dream content. Lately, however, I find myself choosing to simply stay there, in the state of feeling, dwelling in it with curiosity, rather than resisting it or cursing it.
It is such a strange experience — to know that there was a dream based simply on feeling, minus any sense “data” (ie. images or story). A remarkably common experience, it’s one often reported to me by individuals when they believe they haven’t been dreaming and are trying to remember more of their dreams. My suggestion to them is always to try to record whatever you can remember, even if it’s just one fading feeling.
Why? The act of recording gets the body and the brain into the habit of giving attention to dreams and dreaming. This typically works toward the dreamer eventually remembering more dream details in subsequent sleeps. I think the reason this is successful is because it honors the fact that a feeling is a dream. It is. In fact, a dream may be — at its core — all feeling. The images and stories we assign to those feelings (the dream content) may simply be a mechanism for communicating those feelings to our conscious awareness. (More on that in a future article.)
This tip for remembering more dreams doesn’t address the fact that this phenomenon of feeling-without-dream-content also occurs for active dreamers, who dream on a regular basis. And it doesn’t get at the deeper question: what is this experience of feeling I can’t possibly explain, describe, or record, but know for certain is?
There is a word for this, and it’s one of my favorite words: ineffable. It’s a word I first learned in association with the indescribable experience of feeling near to God (in a text by revered Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel), but it’s a word also used for more “mundane,” yet profound encounters — such as those that occur in nature, in relationship with another, or in a meditative state.
So it’s not only in response to dreaming that we experience the ineffable, but since dreaming is such a common experience, the average person (without too much effort) can benefit from dwelling longer in this ineffable state and then, only after, sit and contemplate what it was like to do so. To be clear: the suggestion is to linger a little longer in the feeling without thinking about it while you are doing so.
Some prompts for contemplating after include:
What is it like to feel without knowledge or conscious awareness of what or who caused this feeling in you?
What would be the purpose of simply feeling, without its being attached to a cause or known event?
What could possibly be the benefit of feeling without a known cause?
What is a feeling without form, symbol, or word to describe it?
Does such an experience — this particular feeling without words, without label — remind you of anything?
How do you react to not being able to know the reason you feel the way you do?
Lately, rather than feel frustrated by this feeling without image or known event — which in my case is a reaction to not being able to control the experience or to know for certainty that which I long to know — I’ve been trying to stay in the feeling longer. Allow it to work through me in some mysterious-to-me way.
Here are some questions that have come to me as a result of the experiment. I offer them to you in case they inspire you to consider staying in bed a little longer to dwell in this feeling state yourself, instead of getting out of bed, convinced you didn’t even dream.
Is this what it was like for me to encounter reality as a baby, pre-verbal, without labels for objects, needs, desires, or sense experiences? What is it like for me now to return to that kind of existence, for just a moment?
Is this feeling state the same psychic state that intuition arises from? Could my acclimating to this state of being increase or improve my intuitive capacity?
When I am in this feeling state, am I closer to the sacred, closer to the Divine?
What would it mean to live my life more in a state like this, wordless but rich in feeling? Could I?
This is yet another opportunity for spiritual growth offered to us when we choose to pay attention to our dreams.
As you might know or not, I work one-on-one with dreamers, guiding those interested in remembering, exploring, understanding, and excavating their dreams. My one-on-one work with clients is rooted in Natural Dreamwork. This type of dreamwork engages the senses and activates memory, reconnecting you to past versions of yourself or enabling visions of a future You, often generating hope and healing. You may discover that by working deeply with a dream, you will feel and heal in ways you didn’t even know you could or needed to.
With dreamwork, we begin to identify the patterns that play out again and again in our dreams and in our relationships, learning how to recognize them in waking life, as well. We also reconnect with our desires, our creativity, our interests, and our passion for life and for people. Over time, we get better at feeling into (rather than only trying to understand) the “language” of the dream.
Clients choose to work with me for a variety of reasons, including a desire to remember more dreams, understand “strange” or recurring dreams and nightmares, heal old wounds, feel more alive and connected in waking life, or mend relationships with themselves, their loved ones, or people who have passed.
Some choose to meet to discuss and explore paranormal or supernatural experiences they’ve had in dreams or in waking life visions, as well as nonordinary states of awareness achieved through transcendent experiences or psychedelics. Some seek support with intuitive development. You can learn more about the work I do, and the style of dreamwork I practice at jenmaidenberg.com.
(Featured Image: Photograph of Henri Matisse’s Head of a Woman, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2023. Matisse’s work, as of 2025, is in the public domain.)