95: Sleep Science Today with Andrew Colsky - Episode 9595: Sleep Science Today with Andrew Colsky - Episode 95
UK Health Radio Podcast
Andrew Kolsky and Professor Sharon Sliwinski talk about dreams as powerful testimony, from Nelson Mandela’s nightmare to Covid-era dream projects and work with people using a safe consumption site. The conversation links sleep, trauma, politics and practical tips for paying attention to and sharing dream life.
42:02•14 Jul 2026
When Dreams Tell the Truth: Sleep, Trauma and the Museum of Dreams
Episode Overview
- Dreams can act as testimony, offering evidence of personal, social and political experiences, from apartheid to family rupture.
- Nightmares and traumatic dreams may both signal disturbance and serve as the mind’s attempt to repair and process trauma.
- Covid-related dreaming showed how porous dream life is to social change and anxiety, including children processing lockdown and screen use.
- Work with a safe consumption site revealed severe sleep and dream loss among injection drug users, highlighting an overlooked harm.
- Respecting sleep, following associations in dreams, and sharing them with others are key steps to learning from dream life.
“Dreams are evidence for your lived experience. They help you show, they show you what you're going through, but they put it in a new form.”
What insights can experts and survivors share about addiction? This conversation on Sleep Science Today takes a surprising route there, through dreams. Sleep host Andrew Kolsky chats with Professor Sharon Sliwinski, author of *An Alphabet for Dreamers: How to See the World with Eyes Closed*, about why dreams matter far beyond the bedroom. You’ll hear how she moved from studying powerful images like “photographs from the Nazi camps” to treating dreams as equally serious evidence of human experience.
One of the most striking stories centres on Nelson Mandela’s recurring nightmare of walking home from prison through an utterly empty world.
Sliwinski treats this as testimony to life under apartheid, explaining that “dreams are a kind of testimony to our experience… evidence for our lived experience.” She also shares her own long-delayed understanding of nightmares linked to family conflict and suicidal ideation, showing how dreams can mirror a life “ripped in half” and eventually help make sense of deep pain.
The episode then moves into the Museum of Dreams project, including work with vulnerable communities such as people using a safe consumption site in Toronto. Many face severe sleep loss and, with it, what she calls “dream loss” — losing a mental space that helps people cope. For anyone dealing with trauma, health challenges or substance use, this idea lands hard: losing sleep can mean losing one of the mind’s natural repair tools.
You’ll also get a preview of the book’s alphabet format and three practical tips: value sleep as more than just ‘recharging’, follow associations in your dreams rather than forcing logic, and share dreams as a powerful form of connection, much like Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” moment. If dreams are quietly telling the story of your life, what might yours be saying right now?
Do you want to link to this podcast?
Get the buttons here!
More From This Show
The latest episodes from the same podcast.