Sandman and the Cats of Dreams - Narrative, Phasic REM, and Zone 2

I have dreamed of animals that speak.
In the silence of night, I have heard stories told through feline eyes, full of wisdom and warning.
In Sandman, the Cats of Dreams reveal a world where cats once ruled the Earth — until humans dreamed together in another direction, changing the course of reality.

This tale reminds me: dreams are not just private images, but collective narratives capable of reorganizing how we live.

The Original Paradigm: Dream as Collective Narrative

For Indigenous peoples, to dream was to weave narratives of belonging.
Dreams were not isolated but shared in rituals, circles, and stories that guided community decisions.
A collective dream could reorganize hunting, territory, war, or peace.

The cats of Sandman echo this paradigm: when all dream the same dream, reality itself can shift.
The avatar Math reminds us: “To narrate together is the way to transform the real. Dreaming is the rehearsal of what we may live together.”

The Old World’s Domestication

The Old World reduced dreaming into three forms of domestication:

• Religion turned it into prophecy and dogma.
  
  

• Cartesian science dismissed it as mental noise.
  
  

• The market commodified it — the industry of desires, entertainment, and advertising.
  
  

In Sandman, the fable of the cats denounces this process: when humans domesticated the collective dream, they imposed a reality where only they ruled, erasing other possibilities of existence.

Sleep Science and Evidence

The story of the cats aligns with phasic REM sleep, a stage where:

• The brain shows peaks of intense activation, with rapid eye movements (phasic bursts).
  
  

• This activity correlates with vivid, image-rich dreams.
  
  

• Neuroscience shows that phasic REM plays a crucial role in emotional and narrative integration, weaving experiences into coherent stories.
  
  

Like in Sandman, phasic REM is where the brain creates narratives that reorganize our vision of the world.

Zone 1, Zone 2, and Zone 3

• Zone 1: dreams reduced to private illusion, without real consequence.
  
  

• Zone 2: dreams recognized as collective narrative, capable of guiding life.
  
  

• Zone 3: dreams hijacked by ideologies or markets, turned into dogma or product.
  
  

The Cats of Dreams remind us of the power of Zone 2: when we narrate together, we can change shared reality.

Synthesis

The cat tale in Sandman teaches us that dreaming is more than escape: it is weaving narratives that sustain worlds.

• In original paradigms, dreams were collective guides.
  
  

• In the Old World, they were domesticated as dogma, noise, or merchandise.
  
  

• In science, phasic REM reveals how the brain generates vivid narratives that integrate memory and emotion.
  
  

• In our framework, dreams gain true potency in Zone 2, as rehearsals of shared futures.
  
  

Or, as the avatar Math concludes:
“A dream alone is memory. Many dreams together are future.”

Suggested References:

• Graeber, D. & Wengrow, D. (2021). The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
  
  

• Hobson, J. A. & Pace-Schott, E. F. (2002). The cognitive neuroscience of sleep: Neuronal systems, consciousness and learning. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
  
  

• Nir, Y. & Tononi, G. (2010). Dreaming and the brain: from phenomenology to neurophysiology. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.