Can Travel Be Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of? For One Woman, Absolutely

When I travel, I go into overdrive, cramming as many experiences as I can into every day. It’s a matter of getting the most for my money and time. But no matter what, I still have to sleep for at least eight hours. If I skimp, I pay a price in a kind of foggy-headedness that makes the Taj Mahal and Eiffel Tower seem ordinary and turns converting currency into a dangerously difficult task.

We spend a third of our lives in sleep. Over the years, I’ve realized that snoozing isn’t necessarily a waste, particularly when I awake and remember my dreams.

I love to dream and find that, for no reason I understand, I do it more consistently and vividly on the road. When I stayed in a hotel room overlooking the Cevennes Mountains of southern France, I dreamed I was a medieval princess, wearing a wimple and attended by two rail-thin bloodhounds. Sleeping in a tent pitched in a rain forest glade near Berner’s Bay, about 35 miles north of Juneau, Alaska, I dreamed I was a salmon, fighting my way upriver to the pool where I was born. St. Teresa of Avila appeared in one of the dreams I had in a bed with a cross over it at a Carmelite monastery retreat center in New Hampshire. This probably happened because I’d been reading “Interior Castle,” a volume of memoirs by St. Teresa, just before falling asleep. When a sneak thief entered my room in a pension on the French Polynesian island of Huahine and woke me suddenly, I had my wits about me enough to scare him away, even though part of me was still fleeing the volcano that had been erupting in my dreams.

In torpid tropical climates, my dreams are especially compelling, full of close calls with disaster and encounters with people I haven’t thought of in years. This may run in my family. My brother recalls that he dreamed he was being chased by Charles Manson while sleeping on a screened-in porch at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu. He woke up and screamed, only to find a mosquito buzzing around his ear.

I don’t know if women dream more than men when traveling, though I believe that the two sexes travel in different ways. Men like to do, while women like to be, which is why some of us value simple conversations with strangers more than, say, bicycling over the Khyber Pass. So it seems to me a very female thing to see enriched dreaming as a noteworthy and welcome, if unexpected, fringe benefit of travel.

I dream at home, of course. But when I remember them, my at-home dreams usually are easy to interpret--the subconscious rehashings of daytime dilemmas involving relationships and work. Surreal dreams about my real problems often make me wake up laughing. That usually puts my troubles in perspective.

It has long been thought that dreaming, which occurs during a relatively light phase of rest known as REM (for rapid eye movement) sleep, may help healthy people deal with the events of their waking lives.

Small wonder, then, that sleep deprivation is a common form of torture, engendering delusions. Dr. Anthony Storr, a professor of psychiatry, noted in “Solitude: A Return to the Self” (Ballantine Books; $11) that insomnia is often the precursor to psychotic episodes among the mentally ill. This led him to suggest that “entering the mad world of dreams each night probably promotes mental health in ways we do not fully understand.”

Of course, none of this explains why my dreams are so much richer on the road than my dreams at home, and so much harder to figure out. After a few days away I seem to stop working through my problems while asleep and start having fantastical dreams with no apparent reference to my everyday life.

What is my brain up to? Could it be on vacation, like its owner, and simply having a little fun? Or could something more exciting be happening when I’m dreaming my weird dreams on the road?

I’m happy to have my therapeutically useful at-home dreams, but I really prize the ones that defy interpretation and most often occur when I’m away. In these dreams, it is as if I peek through the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis’ Narnia books at another world where I can walk with St. Teresa of Avila and swim up a boiling Alaskan river like a pretty pink salmon.

Artists and mystics are thought to be more familiar with the alternate reality I’ve glimpsed in my traveling dreams, more able, as Diane Ackerman says in “A Natural History of the Senses” (Vintage; $13), to “transcend our rigorous but routinely analyzing senses and become closer to the raw experience of nature that pours into the unconscious, the world of dreams, the source of myth.”

Just in case the dreams don’t come when I’m on the road, I read books to prod them along, novels that don’t cleave to the way things are in the world we know, like those of Isabel Allende. Recently, at home, I read Gita Mehta’s “A River Sutra,” a skein of fantastic, interconnected stories that got me dreaming--again--of India.

But more important than books are the beds in which I’ve shut my eyes when I’m traveling. I think back fondly on some in Paris, Rajasthan, India, and Oaxaca, Mexico, where I dreamed brilliant dreams. On the other hand, I have terrible memories of beds in which I couldn’t sleep. I was up all night in a hot tent at a campground in Zion National Park in Utah and, once, couldn’t sleep a wink in a cabin too close to the ship’s engine on a Caribbean cruise.

What would I have dreamed about near the narrows of the Virgin River in Zion or floating past the coast of Martinique? Never mind the sleep deprivation. Missing the chance to dream in places like these is a real waste.