ABSTRACT
I grew up in a mid-sized city in a working and middle-class neighborhood within walking distance of a small college campus. The campus included green space featuring a small canyon laced with trails around a small spring-fed lake and creek. The green space played witness to a variety of formative experiences throughout my youth and helped nurture my appreciation for the outdoors. I left to attend college in another town before returning to my home city to pursue graduate studies. I soon received word about an effort to remove invasive species and replant native species throughout the green space of the college campus I knew so well from my youth. I volunteered a few half-days alongside others from the campus and local community. I met some interesting people and retired home feeling good about my involvement. At the end one of these days, while falling asleep, I experienced a series of dreamlets, the vivid dreamlike sensations sometimes experienced during Stage 1 sleep, or the hypnagogic stage where one is halfway between wakeful consciousness and sleep (Vaitl et al., 2005). My dreamlets entailed vivid imagery of the leaf patterns of the plants I handled that day, along with a somatic sensation I can best describe as an amalgamation of all my repetitive movements of the day into a singular yet fluid and complex pattern. My brain was reliving the experience of the day and effectively reinforcing the neural networks representing them. I found myself enthralled with the insight that the very form of my mind and body was being reshaped as a function of my interactions with the world. I also realized that this was and would be an inescapable truth across my entire lifespan.
