Essay/Term paper: Dreams

Essay, term paper, research paper:  College Essays

Dreams


The powers of dreams have always been underestimated. There is a whole
new world in the sub conscious mind that helps us in a subtle way. In this
project you will see how a baby was born because of a dream, how nightmares can
be partially good for you, be given a background on dreams in general and
details on interpreting your own dreams amongst other things.

Background

Everybody dreams but not everybody can remember them. We usually don't
remember dreams when we suddenly wake up and move about. This happens when you
are usually in a rush, when your alarm clock goes off or you are pressured to
get up quickly. You remember dreams on such occasions as you lie in on the
weekends when you wake up slowly and gradually change from the sub-conscious
mind to the conscious mind. This is called lucid dreaming. With this you can
take partial control of what happens during a dream. Since you can do this you
don't have to be restricted to do all the things you do in real life but you
could do whatever you like because it's your mind that's controlling you not
your body and gravity. For example, you could fly or walk through walls.

The powers of dreams

The dreaming world could be a very powerful thing so much so that it
causes a baby to be born because of lucid dreaming. In a true story taken from
the book called Living with Dreams a woman dreamt that she just had a period in
her dreams. This was so realistic that she actually thought she had a real
period not one dreamt up in a dream. A few days later she had sex thinking that
it was the best time to have sex without becoming pregnant. Two or three weeks
she felt something strange was happening and so consulted a doctor who said that
she had become pregnant. All this happened just because of a dream.
Another dream that caused panic was when a student from university had
just completed a project and all he had to do was hand it in the morning.
Because he was thinking about this project so much the project became a part of
his dreams. In his dreams he had dreamt of handing it in. So the next morning he
got up thinking that he had handed in his project and went to university with
the project back home. The previous two examples tell us what dreams can make us
think and that they can have such an effect on our lives.

Interpreting dreams

Many people haven't got the skills of understanding what exactly their
dreams mean. For somebody to interpret other people's dreams they need to know a
lot about the person they're interpreting for as well as the dream itself. To
explain this, for example, seeing a elephant might mean totally different things
to different people such as a zoo keeper who'll probably see it as a harmless
and a beautiful mammal whilst another person might see the elephant as a ugly,
dangerous animal. With this example it tells us that everybody is different and
the same dream with a elephant could be differently interpreted to everybody.
Because everybody is different, and the same dreams mean different things to
different people, books which contain the guide to interpreting dreams cannot be
always correct but they could still remain useful to provide a stepping stone to
interpreting your own dreams.

Examples of interpreted dreams

The type of dreams you have relates to the way you are feeling. For
example, if you have confusing dreams you will probably feel confused in real
life. To show this, here's a example of a true dream when somebody dreamt of a
watermelon eating a pig. Here, the opposite occurs to what would happen in real
life. This indicates some confusion from the dreamer. Without this dream being
analysed by a professional the dreamer would have thought of it as a funny and
useless dream but since it was analysed the expert on dreams knew that the
dreamer had a lot of confusion in his life. This was to be later proved because
the dreamer admitted that he was having a affair with another woman and didn't
know whether to get a divorce , end the affair or just to continue as it was.

A second example that was interpreted was when there was giant talking
spider who has gradually taking over a man's house. This dream was from a man
who was having a affair with a woman rather than staying with his wife. The
purpose of this dream was to show that the affair had started small and then the
relationship had become worse (remember the spider took time to make the web
that had covered all the house). A reason he had this dream was to tell him to
stop the affair now or the relationship would get too out of hand in the future.
This example was bizarre but when it was analysed there was a obvious reason for
it.

Nightmares

Nightmares are the dreams that everyone feels they could do much better
without but as with other dreams they have a reason. This will be explained
later. When somebody has a nightmare you might have the feelings of being
paralysed, being suffocated and/or having another horrible thing. Unlike lucid
dreaming you have no choice but to remember the dream. Originally in the
Medieval times nightmares were known as a supernatural spirit that came to
haunt you in the night. These spirits that haunted you were usually female and
this was shown by the word "mare". They came to suffocate you during your sleep,
or so it was thought.

Nightmares occur when somebody is under stress or is having problems. In
nightmares the victim is usually on his own against the supernatural spirit
that's attacking them. When the person eventually wakes up from the nightmare
the person still thinks that they are being attacked. This leaves the person
crying for help, trying to get the creature off themselves and gasping for air
after suffocation. The person who's just had the nightmare needs reassurance
that everything is okay because they still feel that there's a unnatural
creature ready to get them.

In a reoccurring dream a young girl had she found herself in a dark
street near her home. When she was there she felt that there are some "things"
that were chasing her, this made her panic and run away. The problem for the
girl was that the further she ran away and the faster she ran she always had the
sense that some "things" were chasing her. Whatever the girl did she felt that
the "things" were chasing her no matter what happened. She woke up at the point
of the nightmare when she had run as far as she could and it was physically
impossible for her to run further. When she woke up she cried for help, was
soaking wet from her own sweat and was exhausted. The girl had tried to forget
all about the nightmares but this was impossible because it had kept the girl
awake most nights. The same nightmare had continued to occur with the girl
because she did think about the reason the dream had happened. In the end the
girl told somebody about these dreams and admitted that the "things" that had
chased her were her feelings towards her mother. She had these horrible feelings
towards her mother because her mother never congratulated her and gave her
praise. Even from this example of a nightmare it showed us that the purpose of
the nightmare being repeated night after night was to force the girl to get all
her feeling out into the open about her mother. After the girl had shared her
experiences she no longer had nightmares.

I feel that dreams are a part of our life that should take more notice
of. The powers of dreams have been expressed by the two examples of dreams you
have read, showing how a woman got pregnant because of dreams and how somebody
forgot to hand in a vital project. Dreams can give us clues about how we are
feeling and what the future will be like. It should be known that even the most
feared kind of dream, nightmares, cure problems and not cause them. It takes the
job of a trained dream interpreter to find out the true meanings of life. To
conclude I feel that the sub-conscious is too powerful to be ignored.

Bibliography

Edgar Cayce On Dreams by Dr. Harmon H Bro and edited by Hugh Lynn Cayce.
Published in 1989 by The Aquarian Press

Living with Dreams by Dr. Roderick Peters. Published in 1990 by Andre Deutsh
Limited