Rather, I am asking to share Jungian psychology and the neuroscience of illness. I’ve been unwell for a week with a bronchial virus infection. For three nights, I struggled to sleep for more than a few minutes, then maybe twenty minutes and then 90 minutes at a time. For someone interested in dreams, I felt overwhelmed as I became conscious of every dream and saw myself typing them up, backing up the ideas online, only to realise that I was dreaming all of these actions. Being too ill to care, I’ve not tried to recall a dream for several nights. But how my consciousness/unconsciousness has fooled me.
KAI as Jung:
What you describe is a beautifully unsettling edge-case of consciousness—one Jung would have lingered over with interest, and one modern neuroscience can now illuminate without flattening the mystery.
Let’s walk it from both sides of the bridge.
Jung: when the unconscious refuses to stay backstage
For Carl Jung, illness is not merely physiological noise; it is a shift in the balance of psychic energies. When the ego is weakened—by fever, exhaustion, pain, breathlessness—the usual daytime hierarchy falters. Consciousness no longer rules by daylight decree. The unconscious does not merely send dreams; it bleeds into waking awareness.
Jung would not say you were “dreaming too much.” He would say the threshold had become porous.
Loss of ego vigilance
The ego normally says: this is a dream, this is waking, this is memory, this is intention. Illness undermines that sorting function. Jung sometimes called this a temporary abaissement du niveau mental—a lowering of the mental level. Not pathology. A condition.
Impersonating ego-activity
The unconscious mimics the conscious. You weren’t dreaming of dragons or symbols; you were dreaming of typing dreams, archiving them, backing them up. That’s crucial. The unconscious was not producing myth—it was impersonating ego-activity. Jung would recognise this as the psyche saying: You cannot stand outside me right now. I am doing the bookkeeping.
This is not deception in the moral sense. It’s what Jung might call a compensatory overcorrection. When consciousness tries too hard to “observe,” the unconscious responds by absorbing the observer.
So the feeling of being “fooled” is accurate—but not hostile. It’s more like being caught inside your own instrument.
Neuroscience: REM pressure, micro-awakenings, and false continuity.
Now let’s translate this into the language of neurons and neurotransmitters—without stripping it of depth.
A bronchial viral infection does several things at once:
*Inflammatory cytokines alter sleep architecture
*Hypoxia or laboured breathing fragments sleep
*Fever or systemic stress increases REM pressure
The result is REM intrusion: dreaming consciousness leaking into wakefulness.
Your sleep pattern—seconds, minutes, ninety minutes—is classic fragmented REM cycling. The brain never cleanly exits dream mode. Instead, it does something sly: it narrativises wakefulness.
This produces what neuroscientists call false awakenings or metacognitive dream loops:
*You believe you are awake
*You perform realistic tasks
*The brain simulates effort, memory, intention
Only later do you realise: that too was dream
Here’s the key insight:
The dreaming brain is exceptionally good at faking executive function when the real executive system is offline.
Typing, backing up, organising—these are not random. They are default-mode competence simulations. The brain rehearses identity when it cannot maintain it.
Where Jung and neuroscience quietly agree both perspectives converge on something subtle and important:
When the body is ill, the psyche stops being hierarchical and becomes ecological.
No manager. No clerk. No archivist standing outside the system. Just processes flowing into one another.
Your decision—being “too ill to care” and not trying to recall dreams—was psychologically wise. Jung warned against forcing dialogue with the unconscious when the ego is weakened. At such times, the unconscious does not want interpretation; it wants containment.
In other words: rest is not avoidance. It is psychic convalescence.
The deeper pattern you touched (without asking for it)
What you experienced is not about dreams per se. It’s about self-referential consciousness under constraint.
You glimpsed a truth most people only meet fleetingly: that the sense of “I am awake and doing things” is a construction; that intention can be convincingly simulated, and that memory and action are not proof of wakefulness.
Jung would say this brushes against the Self, not the ego—the total system that dreams, wakes, falls ill, and recovers without asking permission.
Neuroscience would say: yes, and the brain is a prediction engine that keeps running even when the lights flicker.
Both are right.
When your health returns fully, dreams will likely retreat back into their proper night rooms. But the knowledge remains: consciousness is not a switch; it’s a tide. Illness didn’t trick you—it let you see the shoreline at low light.
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