Dream of fighting people at a party and then cage-fighting with lion, told at World Sleep Day event, Cardiff University, 14th March 2025.

I am having to return from a holiday with my husband because the holiday destination has become dangerous. The place has dark colours, blacks and maroons. I am then on the plane, which is calm. After flying back to the UK we go to my childhood hometown. I realise we can't go to what was my parents' home and instead go the house of a family that my family knew at the time. I break in at the back of the house as we need to charge our phones. The son in that family comes to the house. There is going to be a party in the garden and I recognise my old friend Johnny Two Hats, but he is not friendly. I then need to fight people in the garden ninja style and realise that I am on my own in doing this. A lion then appears and I have to fight the lion. I try to lock it in the house but people keep letting it out, but not on purpose, just when they are opening the doors to go in. I then have to fight the lion in a cage, like in Mixed Martial Arts.   

This dream salon was part of an afternoon of talks and presentations for World Sleep Day at the Cardiff University Brain Imaging Centre, hosted by NaPS, the Neuroscience and Psychology of Sleep Lab. The schedule for the day is here. NaPS researchers gave a talk on how sleep processes memories, and the sleep lab methods that are used to study this. Mark Blagrove then gave a talk on what role dreams might play in this within-sleep processing, contrasting this with our proposal that dream-sharing has an empathy-eliciting and group bonding effect, and that this effect may have led to dream content having evolved across human history in parallel with the evolution of story telling.   

A film made by Cardiff University of Mark Blagrove's talk, the telling and discussion of the above dream, Julia painting the dream, and Julia explaining the composition of the painting, followed by a speeded-up film of the painting process, can be seen here.