I would describe my default play speed as "breakneck". With stuff to find around every corner, I feel compelled to spend most of my time sprinting around the Living Lands grabbing up everything in sight, pausing only to stuff my cheeks with food between battles.
What took me probably a bit too long to realise is that there's good [[link]] reason to slow down and take a break sometimes. Returning to camp heals you for free, and gives you a chance to upgrade equipment, enchant, cook food, and chat to your companions. But something that's easy to miss is that it can also unlock new lore and even quests.
The key is to sleep regularly, and the game doesn't make it super obvious how. No, you don't go to your tent or look for a bed. What you need to do is either go to the adra pillar in camp and interact with it, or walk to the border of the camp, and then choose to exit. For whatever reason, [[link]] the game treats that as sleeping—whereas fast-travelling directly away to your next destination doesn't seem to count.
When you sleep, you dream—or rather, you talk to the mysterious voice inside your head. They offer commentary on quests you've done and choices you've made, and your responses help flesh out your relationship with the voice and learn more about them.
There's even at least one quest you can only get this way. In Dawnshore, the voice gave me the Call of the Past sidequest—I won't spoil the specifics, but that leads you to both [[link]] crucial story information and some powerful rewards, including a great magic weapon. You can stumble upon the location just while exploring, but accepting the quest points you right to it, and it'd be easy to miss otherwise.
I didn't receive a similar quest in the next area, Emerald Stair, even though the same kind of encounter could be found by exploring, so I'm not sure yet if there are more of them to be found in dreams later on or if it's only this one. At the very least, though, the story-relevant chats have continued.
There's no downside to sleeping, either. As in Baldur's Gate 3, any time pressure you may feel is an illusion—you can rest as often as you want without causing any quests to fail or missing anything due to the passage of time.
This advice applies outside the game too, by the way—a regular sleep schedule is the cornerstone of a healthy life. I can't promise your real world dreams will be as informative or rewarding, however.