Blog
Stories of Sound
and Sleep:

OneClock Talks / Part One / Why

  • Jamie Kripke

OneClock founder / designer (and second-generation clockmaker) Jamie Kripke discusses the who, what, where, and why of OneClock in this multi-part video series.

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Go Dark

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

Waking up to sunlight streaming in through the windows is a great pleasure, but is it worth sacrificing your health and wellbeing? When it comes to good sleep, there is beauty in darkness.

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Make Something Wonderful

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

The newly presented archive of Apple founder Steve Jobs prompts a reflection on why we love the personal computer.

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Tis the Gift to Be Simple

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

With unlimited access to content of all kinds, we can house a lot of ideas in our brains. How do we practice mental minimalism?

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OneClock Reads: The Creative Act

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

Legendary music producer Rick Rubin’s book “The Creative Act” inspires a way of being that extends far beyond the studio.

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Loving and Leaving

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

What if we told you that the best way to have good sex was by keeping your bed to yourself—by sleeping alone?

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We’re Listening

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

Contemporary listening lounges draw on the jazz kissa, a 100-year-old Japanese tradition involving vinyl records, cocktails, and high-fidelity audio equipment.

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Midwinter Days

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

On Finding Meaning in Winter: There’s a lot to love about winter, if you’re looking for it.

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Waking up to the Power of Naps

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

There are precious few things you can do in your life that will have a greater positive impact on your health, mood, and longevity on Earth than sleep—and not all of it has to happen at night. If your energy wanes and you find yourself dreaming of nodding off soon after lunch, rest assured. You’re not the only one with sleep on the brain.

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Rewrap the Gift

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

Our holiday traditions around giving and receiving are due for a redux. Here are our tips.

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How Do You Sleep at Night?

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

Your chronotype determines when and how well you sleep, and much about how you feel while awake—but few people know what theirs is, or how to live in harmony with it.

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OneClock Reads: Super Normal

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

In Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary designers Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fakasawa draw our attention to the phenomenon of everyday objects.

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Get Up!

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

Tune your body and mind with some Valentine’s Day morning sex. Or, why we recommend getting down while waking up.

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Fitter, Happier, More Productive?

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

The near constant use of technology in contemporary life can be overwhelming, affecting our health and relationships. Use a less-is-more approach to find physical, mental, and emotional balance in a world dominated by devices.

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Buy Nothing, Sleep In / Thoughts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

As the Black Friday alarm rings at its early hour, we invite you to make a new ritual of sleeping in. And then, once you wake up? Go sit and have coffee with your mom, dad, kids, neighbor, or dog. Watch the sun travel across the kitchen window. Appreciate. Connect. Make it a thing.

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In Your Dreams

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

Humans spend several years dreaming, yet this phenomenon remains mysterious in both purpose and meaning.

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A New Way for the New Year

  • Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly

It’s that time again! The New Year invites us to set intentions for self-improvement and change. Here’s how you can best prepare for a successful refresh.

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The Snooze Button is your Frenemy

  • Jamie Kripke

If you find the idea of quitting the Snooze button intimidating, look at it this way: Snoozing does not equal sleeping. Snoozing is a sad, stressful imitation of real sleep.

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Scaring Yourself Awake

  • Jamie Kripke

From the adrenal gland’s point of view, there’s no difference between the shock of that blaring alarm and the sight of an incoming tsunami. And why would you want to start your day like that?

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A Brief History of Alarm Clocks

  • Jamie Kripke

It seems clear that the need for alarm clocks will never go away. But if the 1787 version of the U.S. Constitution can be amended 27 times, can’t we evolve our alarm clocks, too?

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Product Before Price

  • Jamie Kripke

We set out to make exactly what we wanted, not what the market wanted. The price is what it is because that’s where the price ended up once we'd designed the clock we wanted.

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In Your Dreams

Sleep to dream

Is there anything more fascinating than our dreams? Dreaming is something we all do, regardless of our age, gender, race, or class. We spend roughly five to six years of our lifetime engaging in this universal yet private activity. Dreaming occurs during our REM sleep cycles, which clock in for most of us at one to two hours a night. Even if we don’t remember doing it, dreaming makes up a significant portion of our days—and thus our lives—while remaining one of the most mysterious aspects of human experience.

Are dreams supernatural, the muscle of some greater psychic energy attempting to unify us across space and time on the astral plane? Or, are dreams the messy byproduct of the brain attempting to process and store memories as personal and quotidian as the day that preceded them?

Are dreams a perfunctory evolutionary mechanism, whereby we practice our lizard-brain responses to threatening situations? Or, does this unique kind of sleep serve something far more basic, like, as some ophthalmologists suggest, to oxygenate the cornea?

The answer here depends a lot on your cultural context and personally-derived beliefs, as well as what, if anything, you’re looking to get out of your dreaming life.

Living the dream

Dreams are unpredictable and chaotic, both in the sense of what appears and transpires within them, but also in the emotional effects that may linger long after waking. A seemingly benign dream where little happens can feel uncanny or even ominous to a dreamer—at times even more so than those that are narrative, action-packed, or fantastical. This uneven alignment between what we see and how we feel in dreams is often what leads us to analyze them.

Within Western psychoanalytic traditions like Jungian dream interpretation and Gestalt dream play, and especially in Native American and global Indigenous cultures, dreams are full of personal and collective clues laying in wait to be received, deciphered, and incorporated into our wakefulness.

In Jungian and Gestalt dream analysis, dreams are not merely a remix of the day’s sensations, but are traces from a depth of consciousness that we can choose to tap into to explore our inner selves and possibly even receive existential communication. To those who ascribe to these modalities, dreams are fertile ground seeded with symbolism.

“A symbol doesn’t just tell us about what the dream may appear to be about on the surface,” one article on Jungian dream interpretation explains, “but has meaning and resonance above and beyond the particular situation. As Marie Louise von Franz said, ‘The unconscious doesn’t waste much spit telling you what you already know.’”

Carl Jung believed and taught that dream work was a necessary step in the process of individuation, i.e. the process of forming a stable personality. Relying heavily on an individual’s personally-defined associations as well as archetypes, Jungian dream analysis allows the dreamer to establish a cosmos of their interior lives.

Taking note of where your consciousness goes when you’re sleeping and your guard is down can also serve as a useful temperature-check for how you’re doing in a general sense, even if you go no deeper into analysis (think of the anxiety ridden classics, like teeth-falling-out or naked-on-the-first-day-of-school dreams).

“A new wave of anthropological research is expanding our knowledge of how dreams reflect and actively respond to cultural, social, political, and religious influences in people’s lives,” writes Kelly Bulkeley PhD for Psychology Today. “Especially in times of collective change and crisis, dreams become a powerful source of insight into the dynamic interplay of psyche and culture.”

For Indigenous groups, dreams are regarded as metaphoric, literal, or prophetic, delivering important messages about the self and/or the collective, and often inviting communion with others—living or deceased, human or more-than-human.

Many Native American nations believe that humans contain three souls: the ego-soul that provides breath and life force, the body-soul that is active in waking life, and the free-soul that travels in dreams, trances, and comas. The free-soul frequents the astral plane, where the dreamer meets with animals, ancestors, and other guides. These shamanic visitations are honored, shared and passed down, and understood as both connective and instructive.

“Your soul dreams those dreams; not your body, not your mind. Those dreams come true. The soul travels all over the world when you dream,” says Chippewa Elder John Thunderbird.

Awake to the dream

If you’re curious about the scenarios that emerge in your sleep, there are several things you can do to increase your recall of dreams: namely, setting the intention of tuning in, establishing good sleep hygiene, and recording details in a dream journal immediately after waking.

Science also indicates that how we wake up plays an important role in our ability to remember our dreams. Neurochemically speaking, our memory faculties are compromised when our adrenaline is spiked, as it almost always is when we use a traditional alarm clock.

If recall and analysis are not enough to satisfy your interests, you can also train yourself to engage in lucid dreaming.

A lucid dream is “the dream that you guide, the dream you wake up in,” writes Jesse Ball in his book Sleep, Death’s Brother, which he explains as a guidebook for lucid dreaming uniquely written for children, incarcerated persons, and others looking to escape their conditions by exercising autonomy in their dreams.

Ball believes dreams are experiences from waking life reflected through a warped mirror. There’s “the world (what you see and feel)” while you’re awake, he explains, and then “dreams (things you have seen and felt, in new combinations).” For Ball, this reconfiguration holds no great meaning, but it does indicate there is a porousness between the activities of day and night that can be utilized for empowerment and enjoyment.

While some of us might bristle at Ball’s very blunt declaration that the objects, persons, and events that appear in our dreams are inconsequential, what he offers in Sleep, Death’s Brother is nonetheless generous. If you follow Ball’s clear instructions for encouraging a lucid dream—which involve adopting habits that bring you greater awareness for determining whether you are awake or asleep—your dreamscape can become an endless playground starring you, the intrepid oneironaut.

“You will be awake in the dream and able to do whatever you like,” he writes. “After a while, you will probably fall back into sleep, and then in the morning you will wake up and life will continue as usual. There is nothing to worry about and nothing to be afraid of.”

Sounds pretty…dreamy.