Essay/Term paper: Dreams

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Critical 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