What do you see when you sleep?

 

4/28/2009

By Truneal Rogers

We’ve all had this dream where we’re falling, and falling and right before we hit the ground we wake up gasping for breath and full of panic. Now, if you plugged your scenario into an online dream analyser, you would learn that since you have been going through a tough break-up – with its stresses and upheavals – this dream echoes and amplifies what’s going on in your waking life.

Human beings dream, and so do, scientist believe, most mammals and some birds. On the most basic level, a dream is the experience you have of envisioned images, sounds or other sensations while you sleep. But they are much more than that. Sigmund Freud’s theory was that your dreams are an expression of what you are repressing during the time that you are awake. Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology, believes that dreams provide messages about ‘lost’ or ‘neglected’ parts of ourselves that need to be reintegrated.
Many dreams simply come from a preoccupation with the day’s activities, but some can offer rich, symbolic expressions – a window between the conscious and unconscious that can fill the gaps of our self-knowledge while providing knowledge and insight.

Different states of consciousness, like awake, asleep, alert, drowsy, excited, or bored cause different brain activity.
Other areas control things like

breathing, converting light to vision, balance when we walk and things like that. There is another area which controls imagination. This is more than dreaming of a new car or picturing yourself winning the multi-million dollar lottery. When you look at clouds and see shapes or water puddles and see images, this is the “order from chaos” part of your imagination. The mind cannot deal with chaos very well, in fact, it will resist it and sometimes manufacture order. Then there is your memory. During certain cycles of brain activity when we sleep, we can “view” these dreams with our conscious mind and record them in our memory, which is why we sometimes remember them.

Some scientists believe that we dream all the time, even while awake. The brain and mind, while at rest, review and analyse in it’s own way, long term and short term memory. It goes through emotions, thoughts, ideas and actions of the short term memory. All this data, as well as your subconscious ‘reading between the lines’ of what people do and tell you is then processed unsupervised by you. It’s put all together in a form of a visual screenplay – a medley of sight, sound and emotion – the end result being...a dream.

Kelly Walden, a certified clinical hypnotherapist and dream coach, identifies the different categories of dreams in her book I had the strangest dream...the dreamer’s dictionary for the 21st century. They are: processing, venting or nightmares, integration, breakdown or breakthrough, recurring, precognitive, prophetic and wish fulfillment. The most common being recurring and venting dreams. Walden added that “bizarreness will increase... the more you have on your mind”.

All of us can remember strange dreams, but interpreting and understanding them can be tricky. Some of the most common dreams include teeth falling out (indicating a possible fear of aging or death) or public nudity (feelings of vulnerability or exposure of weakness).
These are examples of dreams that exist across time, culture and people.

Some people dream the same dream night after night for days, weeks or even years. Walden sees them as more important than other dreams. Most of them are positive or neutral in nature.
Dreams are by nature uncontrollable, and have been a mystery since Adam drew his first breath, much like fairy tales, myths and stuff of legends. Much can be learned from our dreams, if only the proper attention is paid to them.

What do your dreams say about you?

Comments

[free psychic reading]

It is very difficult to understand dreams, scientists, psychic readers, they all make mistakes when they try to understand dreams.
I think dreams are just immpossible to inderstand because they means nothing...

That's a good question:
Why anyone accept that dreams are incompréhensible?
I think it is a really good question, a difficult one...