Dreams

Well, there are many schools of thought on this question, but most agree on a few fundamentals. It appears that dreams help us sort through life events and worries, aid in discarding unnecessary data, and give us insight into the past, present, and future. Dreams appear to be the sub-conscious mind telling us how to proceed or warning us of perceived dangers. They are the core of our selves, with ego stripped away, and are not bound by the five senses, or by physics - we therefore can fly, walk on water, climb the highest peaks, and generally defy the walls that entrap us in daily living while we dream.

Dreams have been a subject of wonderment since the beginning of time. Even the Bible mentions dreams and gives us clues as to their real purpose:

"For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not. In a dream, in a vision of night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed, Then He openeth the ears of men and sealeth their instructions......" Job, 33:14

Maybe we should pay more attention - someone important may be trying to tell us something through our dreams!

Although we don't know exactly why we dream, many studies have confirmed that we go through definite stages of sleep every night, and that we progressively move through four distinct types of non-dreaming (non rapid eye movement NREM) sleep. Each cycle lasts approximately 90 minutes, and the stages graduate as far as how deep the sleep is. In the first half of the night, we generally cycle between stages 3 and 4, which are the stages at which the deepest sleep occurs. Stages 1 and 2, along with much more rapid eye movement (REM) activity tends to occur more in the second half of the night.

REM activity is currently thought to be the stage of sleep where dreaming occurs, and many studies have been done in which subjects have been awakened at varying stages of sleep, resulting in a large percentage reporting dreams when awakened during REM sleep, and a very small percentage reporting dreams when awakened from NREM sleep. It does indeed appear that REM sleep and dreaming are basically synonymous.

So now that we have the boring physiological stuff out of the way, we can get into the interesting parts of dreaming, such as what dreams mean, and the different types of dreams. One thing to remember as you try to sort out what individual dreams mean is that your dream is about YOU. You may have a supporting cast in the dream, but it is still about you - and only you. For instance, if you dream that your spouse is cheating, that dream doesn't necessarily mean that it is really happening. What it does mean is that you feel that something is amiss, and it is manifesting in your dreams. Of course, dreams can also give us insight into real things happening in our lives, and maybe even foretell the future at times, but analysis has to be done on each individual dream without interference from the ego to determine whether or not you have really seen your future, or whether you are just worried about some aspect of your life.

For information on specific dreams and on dreaming in general, please see the links on the top left on this page.

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