9 Things You Did Not Know About Dreams...

Everyone dreams—every single night—and yet we tend to know so little about our dreams. Where do they come from? What do they mean? Can we control them and should we try to interpret them? We spoke to the dream experts to bring you nine surprising facts about dreams. Read before snoozing.
1. Dreaming can help you learn.
If you’re studying for a test or trying to learn a new task, you might consider taking a nap or heading to bed early rather than hovering over a textbook an hour longer. Here’s why: When the brain dreams, it helps you learn and solve problems, say researchers at Harvard Medical School. In a study that appeared in a recent issue of Current Biology, researchers report that dreams are the brain’s way of processing, integrating and understanding new information. To improve the quality of your sleep—and your brain’s ability to learn—avoid noise in the bedroom, such as the TV, which may negatively impact the length and quality of dreams.

2. Just like men, women can have orgasms during dreams.
Did you think only men experience this phenomenon? Not true, says Barbara Bartlik, MD, a psychiatrist and sex therapist in New York. Warning, further reading may produce blushing: “Women have orgasms during their sleep, just as men do,” she says. “These orgasms often accompany erotic dreams, but they also may occur during dreams of a nonerotic nature.” When women dream, she says, it’s not uncommon for their genitals to become engorged and lubricated. “This occurs during REM sleep, which happens several times during the night,” she says. A similar thing happens to men. “Men get erections during REM sleep, whether or not the man is having an erotic dream.”

3. The most common dream? Your spouse is cheating.
If you’ve ever woken up in a cold sweat after dreaming about your husband’s extramarital escapade with your best friend, you’re not alone, says Lauri Quinn Loewenberg, a dream expert, author and media personality. “The most commonly reported dream is the one where your mate is cheating,” she says. Loewenberg conducted a survey of more than 5,000 people, and found that the infidelity dream is the nightmare that haunts most people—sometimes on a recurring basis. It rarely has anything to do with an actual affair, she explains, but rather the common and universal fear of being wronged or left alone.

4. You can have several—even a dozen—dreams in one night.
It’s not just one dream per night, but rather dozens of them, say experts—you just may not remember them all. “We dream every 90 minutes throughout the night, with each cycle of dreaming being longer than the previous,” explains Loewenberg. “The first dream of the night is about 5 minutes long and the last dream you have before awakening can be 45 minutes to an hour long.” It is estimated that most people have more than 100,000 dreams in a lifetime.

5. You can linger in a dream after waking.
Have you ever woken up from such a beautiful, perfect dream that you wished you could go back to sleep to soak it all up (you know, the dream about George Clooney?)? You can! Just lie still—don’t move a muscle—and you can remain in a semi-dreamlike state for a few minutes. “The best way to remember your dreams is to simply stay put when you wake up,” says Loewenberg. “Remain in the position you woke up in, because that is the position you were dreaming in. When you move your body, you disconnect yourself from the dream you were just in seconds ago.”

6. Even bizarre dreams can be interpreted.
While it can be hard to believe that an oddball dream about your mother, a circus and a snowstorm can have any bearing on real life, there may be symbolism and potential meaning to be mined in every dream—you just have to look for it, says Harvard-trained psychotherapist Jeffrey Sumber. "The meaning of our dreams oftentimes relates to things we are needing to understand about ourselves and the world around us,” he says. Instead of shrugging off strange dreams, think about how they make you feel. “We tend to dismiss these dreams due to the strange components, yet it is the feeling we have in these dreams that matters most,” he explains. “Sometimes the circus and the snowstorm are just fillers that allow us to process the range of emotions we feel about our mother and give us the necessary distraction so we can actually experience that spectrum of emotion.”

7. Recurring dreams may be your mind’s way of telling you something.
Do you have the same nightmare over and over again? Loewenberg suggests looking for underlying messages in recurring dreams so that you can rid yourself of them. For example, a common recurring nightmare people have involves losing or cracking their teeth. For this dream, she recommends that people think about what your teeth and your mouth represent. “To the dreaming mind, your teeth, as well as any part of your mouth, are symbolic of your words,” she says. “Paying attention to your teeth dreams helps you to monitor and improve the way you communicate.”

8. You can control your dreams.
The premise of the new movie Inception is that people can take the reins of their dreams and make them what they want them to be. But it may not just be a Hollywood fantasy. According to the results of a new survey of 3,000 people, dream control, or “lucid dreaming” may be a real thing. In fact, 64.9 percent of participants reported being aware they were dreaming within a dream, and 34 percent said they can sometimes control what happens in their dreams. Taking charge of the content of your dreams isn’t a skill everyone has, but it can be developed, says Kelly Bulkeley, PhD, a dream researcher and visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkley, California. The technique is particularly useful for people who suffer from recurring nightmares, he says. Dr. Bulkeley suggests giving yourself a pep talk of sorts before you go to sleep by saying: “If I have that dream again, I’m going to try to remember that’s it’s only a dream, and be aware of that.” When you learn to be aware that you are dreaming—within a dream—you not only have the power to steer yourself away from the monster and into the arms of Brad Pitt, for instance, but you train your mind to avoid nightmares in the first place. “Lucid dreaming enhances your ability to learn from the dream state,” says Dr. Bulkeley.

9. You don’t have to be asleep to dream.
Turns out, you can dream at your desk at work, in the car, even at your kid’s soccer game. Wakeful dreaming—not to be confused with daydreaming—is real and somewhat easy to do, says Dr. Bulkeley; it just involves tapping into your active imagination. The first step is to think about a recent dream you had (preferably a good one!). “Find a quiet contemplative place and bring a dream that you remember back into your waking awareness and let it unfold,” he says. “Let the dream re-energize.” Wakeful dreaming can be used as a relaxation tool, but Dr. Bulkeley says it can also help your mind process a puzzling dream. “It creates a more fluid interaction between unconscious parts of the mind and wakeful parts of the mind,” he says.

http://www.womansday.com/health-fitness/9-things-you-didnt-know-about-dreams-110657

http://www.womansday.com/

More on dream therapy, with links to other articles about dreams

The Significance of Dreams: 12 Famous Dreams

Paul McCartney Finds "Yesterday" In a Dream
Paul McCartney is one of the most famous singer/ songwriters of all time. According to the Guinness Book of Records, his Beatles song "Yesterday" (1965) has the most cover versions of any song ever written and, according to record label BMI, was performed over seven million times in the 20th century.

The tune for "Yesterday" came to Paul McCartney in a dream...

The Beatles were in London in 1965 filming Help! and McCartney was staying in a small attic room of his family's house on Wimpole Street. One morning, in a dream he heard a classical string ensemble playing, and, as McCartney tells it:

"I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, 'That's great, I wonder what that is?' There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th -- and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot, but because I'd dreamed it, I couldn't believe I'd written it. I thought, 'No, I've never written anything like this before.' But I had the tune, which was the most magic thing!"

(Note: I had also read that Paul McCartney dreamed of his mother sometime after her death that inspired another very famous song. He had been struggling to come to terms with her loss, but in the dream she appeared before him with the message 'Let It Be'. 

Sources: Paul McCartney -- Many Years From Now, Barry Miles (NY, Henry Holt, 1997)
The Committee of Sleep, D. Barrett, 2001
Wikipedia

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Inspired By a Dream

In the summer of 1816, nineteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover, the poet Percy Shelley (whom she married later that year), visited the poet Lord Byron at his villa beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Stormy weather frequently forced them indoors, where they and Byron's other guests sometimes read from a volume of ghost stories. One evening, Byron challenged his guests to each write one themselves.

Mary's story, inspired by a dream, became Frankenstein.

"When I placed my head upon my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think... I saw -- with shut eyes, but acute mental vision -- I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous Creator of the world.
...I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. ...I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me. I must try to think of something else. I recurred to my ghost story -- my tiresome, unlucky ghost story! O! if I could only contrive one which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened that night!
Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke upon me. 'I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted me my midnight pillow.' On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day with the words, 'It was on a dreary night of November', making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream."

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, from her introduction to Frankenstein

Dream Leads to Nobel Prize
Otto Loewi (1873-1961), a German born physiologist, won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1936 for his work on the chemical transmission of nerve impulses. In 1903, Loewi had the idea that there might be a chemical transmission of the nervous impulse rather than an electrical one, which was the common held belief, but he was at a loss on how to prove it. He let the idea slip to the back of his mind until 17 years later he had the following dream. According to Loewi:

"The night before Easter Sunday of that year I awoke, turned on the light, and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of paper. Then I fell asleep again. It occurred to me at 6 o'clock in the morning that during the night I had written down something most important, but I was unable to decipher the scrawl. The next night, at 3 o'clock, the idea returned. It was the design of an experiment to determine whether or not the hypothesis of chemical transmission that I had uttered 17 years ago was correct. I got up immediately, went to the laboratory, and performed a single experiment on a frog's heart according to the nocturnal design."

It took Loewi a decade to carry out a decisive series of tests to satisfy his critics, but ultimately the result of his initial dream induced experiment became the foundation for the theory of chemical transmission of the nervous impulse and led to a Nobel Prize!

Dr. Loewi noted: "Most so called 'intuitive' discoveries are such associations made in the subconscious."

Sources: The War of the Soups and the Sparks: The Discovery of Neurotransmitters and the Dispute Over How Nerves Communicate, Elliot S Valenstein
Otto Loewi, "An Autobiographical Sketch", Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Autumn, 1960

Abraham Lincoln Dreamt of His Assassination
President Abraham Lincoln recounted the following dream to his wife just a few days prior to his assassination:

"About ten days ago, I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary.
I soon began to dream.
There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break?

I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully.

'Who is dead in the White House?' I demanded of one of the soldiers "The President" was his answer; "he was killed by an assassin!" Then came a loud burst of grief form the crowd, which awoke me from my dream."

Lincoln ascribed powerful meanings to his dreams. One of his recurring dreams in particular he considered foretelling and a sign of major events soon to occur. He had this dream the night before his assassination. On the morning of that lamentable day, President Lincoln was discussing matters of the war with General Grant during a cabinet meeting and believed that big news from General Sherman on the front would soon arrive. When Grant asked why he thought so, Lincoln responded:

"I had a dream last night; and ever since this war began I have had the same dream just before every event of great national importance. It portends some important event that will happen very soon."

His friend and law partner, Ward Hill Lamon, noted that Byron's "The Dream" was one of Lincoln's favorite poems and he often heard him repeat the following lines:

Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off waking toils,
They do divide our being;

Source: Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847-1885, Ward Hill Lamon, 1911

Kekulé - Dreams of Molecules & Benzene Structure
Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz is a remarkable figure in the history of chemistry, specifically organic chemistry.

Twice Kekulé had dreams that led to major discoveries!

Kekulé discovered the tetravalent nature of carbon, the formation of chemical/ organic "Structure Theory", but he did not make this breakthrough by experimentation alone. He had a dream! As he described in a speech given at the Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft (German Chemical Society):

"I fell into a reverie, and lo, the atoms were gamboling before my eyes! Whenever, hitherto, these diminutive beings had appeared to me, they had always been in motion; but up to that time, I had never been able to discern the nature of their motion. Now, however, I saw how, frequently, two smaller atoms united to form a pair; how a larger one embraced the two smaller ones; how still larger ones kept hold of three or even four of the smaller; whilst the whole kept whirling in a giddy dance. I saw how the larger ones formed a chain, dragging the smaller ones after them, but only at the ends of the chain. . . The cry of the conductor: “Clapham Road,” awakened me from my dreaming; but I spent part of the night in putting on paper at least sketches of these dream forms. This was the origin of the Structural Theory."

Later, he had a dream that helped him discover that the Benzene molecule, unlike other known organic compounds, had a circular structure rather than a linear one... solving a problem that had been confounding chemists:

"...I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis."

The snake seizing it's own tail gave Kekulé the circular structure idea he needed to solve the Benzene problem!

Said an excited Kekulé to his colleagues, “Let us learn to dream!”

Source: From Serendipity, Accidental Discoveries in Science, by R.M. Roberts, as used byhttp://www.woodrow.org/teachers/chemistry/institutes/1992/Kekule.html

Madame C.J. Walker - From Dream to Millionaire
Madame C.J. Walker (1867-1919) is cited by the Guinness Book of Records as the first female American self-made millionaire. She was also the first member of her family born free.

Madame Walker founded and built a highly successful African-American cosmetic company that made her a millionaire many times over. Walker was suffering from a scalp infection that caused her to loose most of her hair in the 1890’s. She began experimenting with patented medicines and hair-care products.
Then, she had a dream that solved her problems:

“He answered my prayer, for one night I had a dream, and in that dream a big, black man appeared to me and told me what to mix up in my hair. Some of the remedy was grown in Africa, but I sent for it, mixed it, put it on my scalp, and in a few weeks my hair was coming in faster than it had ever fallen out. I tried it on my friends; it helped them. I made up my mind to begin to sell it.”

Walker was an entrepreneur, philanthropist and social activist. She best sums up her rise from a childhood in the poor south to being the head of an international, multi-million dollar corporation in the following quote:

"I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations....I have built my own factory on my own ground."


Sources: On Her Own Ground: the Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker, A'Lelia P. Bundles, 2001
MadamecjWalker.com
Wikipedia
Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture, Kathy Peiss, 1999, Owl Books

The Sewing Machine
Elias Howe invented the sewing machine in 1845. He had the idea of a machine with a needle which would go through a piece of cloth but he couldn't figure out exactly how it would work. He first tried using a needle that was pointed at both ends, with an eye in the middle, but it was a failure. Then one night he dreamt he was taken prisoner by a group of natives. They were dancing around him with spears. As he saw them move around him, he noticed that their spears all had holes near their tips.

When he woke up he realized that the dream had brought the solution to his problem. By locating a hole at the tip of the needle, the thread could be caught after it went through cloth thus making his machine operable.

He changed his design to incorporate the dream idea and found it worked!

Source: A Popular History of American Invention. (Waldemar Kaempffert, ed.) Vol II, New York Scribner's Sons, 1924

The Strange Dream of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) described dreams as occurring in "that small theater of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all night long."

Stevenson said of his now classic novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it was "conceived, written, re-written, re-re-written, and printed inside ten weeks" in 1886. And was conceived in a dream as he describes:

"For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers."

His wife related picturesquely how one night Louis cried out horror-stricken, how she woke him up and he protested, "Why did you waken me? I was dreaming a fine bogy-tale!" She also related how he appeared the next morning excitedly exclaiming, "I have got my schilling-shocker -- I have got my schilling-shocker!"

Stevenson wrote extensively about how his passion for writing interacted with his remarkable dreams and said that, from an early age, his dreams were so vivid and moving that they were more entertaining to him personally than any literature. He learned early in his life that he could dream complete stories and that he could even go back to the same dreams on succeeding nights to give them a different ending. Later he trained himself to remember his dreams and to dream plots for his books.

Sources:
A Chapter on Dreams by Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains, 1892, Chattus & Windus
Robert Louis Stevenson a Critical Biography V2, John Steuart, 2005, Kessinger Publishing
The Committee of Sleep, D. Barrett, 2001
The World of Dreams. R.L Woods, 1947, New York, Random House

Jack Nicklaus Finds a New Golf Swing in a Dream
Golfer Jack Nicklaus found a new way to hold his golf club in a dream, which he credits to improving his golf game. In 1964, Nicklaus was having a bad slump and routinely shooting in the high seventies. After suddenly regaining top scores he reported:

"Wednesday night I had a dream and it was about my golf swing. I was hitting them pretty good in the dream and all at once I realized I wasn't holding the club the way I've actually been holding it lately. I've been having trouble collapsing my right arm taking the club head away from the ball, but I was doing it perfectly in my sleep. So when I came to the course yesterday morning I tried it the way I did in my dream and it worked. I shot a sixty-eight yesterday and a sixty-five today."

Sources: Jack Nicklaus, as told to a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, 27 June 1964
The Committee of Sleep, D. Barrett, 2001

Mathematical Genius & Dreamer- Srinivasa Ramanujan
Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) was one of India's greatest mathematical geniuses. He made substantial contributions to analytical theory of numbers and worked on elliptical functions, continued fractions, and infinite series. In 1914, he was invited in to Cambridge University by the English mathematician GH Hardy who recognized his unconventional genius. He worked there for five years producing startling results and proved over 3,000 theorems in his lifetime.

According to Ramanujan, inspiration and insight for his work many times came to him in his dreams...

A Hindu goddess, named Namakkal, would appear and present mathematical formulae which he would verify after waking. Such dreams often repeated themselves and the connection with the dream world as a source for his work was constant throughout his life.

Ramanujan describes one of his dreams of mathematical discovery:

"While asleep I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of results in elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing..."

Source: Ramanujan, the Man and the Mathematician, S. R. Ranganathan, 1967

Subliminal Clues From Fossil Perceived In Dream
Louis Agassiz (1807-1883) was a Swiss born naturalist, zoologist, geologist, and teacher who emigrated to the US in 1846. He trained and influenced a generation of American zoologists and paleontologists and is one of the founding fathers of the modern American scientific tradition

While Agassiz was working on his vast work "Poissons Fossiles" a list of all know fossil fish, he came across a specimen in a stone slab which he was, at first, unable to figure out. He hesitated to classify it and extract it since an incorrect approach could ruin the specimen. At that time, Agassiz reports having a dream three nights in a row in which he saw the fish in perfect original condition. The first two nights -- being unprepared -- he did not record his image.

By the third night he was ready with pen and paper, and when the fish appeared again in the dream he drew it in the dark, still half asleep. The next day he looked at his drawing which had remarkably different features from the ones he had been working out, hastened to his laboratory and extracting the fossil realized it corresponded exactly to his dream.

Agassiz' creative dream of the fossilized fish may have been induced by having perceived unconsciously a clue in the stone slab which he had ignored while awake.

His dream may have emphasized and drawn his attention to stimuli he had perceived subliminally while he was awake!

Source: Interview with Nikola Tesla, speaking of Agassiz, Tesla, The Modern Sorcerer, Daniel Blair Stewart

Dreams and The King of Horror
Novelist Stephen King describes how dreams affect his writings in an interview with UK reporter Stan Nicholls:

Nicholls: "If the inspiration for Misery didn't come from a real-life incident, where did it come from?"

King: "Like the ideas for some of my other novels, that came to me in a dream. In fact, it happened when I was on Concord, flying over here, to Brown's. I fell asleep on the plane, and dreamt about a woman who held a writer prisoner and killed him, skinned him, fed the remains to her pig and bound his novel in human skin. His skin, the writer's skin. I said to myself, 'I have to write this story.' Of course, the plot changed quite a bit in the telling. But I wrote the first forty or fifty pages right on the landing here, between the ground floor and the first floor of the hotel."

"Another time, when I got road-blocked in my novel It, I had a dream about leeches inside discarded refrigerators. I immediately woke up and thought, 'That is where this is supposed to go.' Dreams are just another part of life. To me, it's like seeing something on the street you can use in your fiction. You take it and plug it right in. Writers are scavengers by nature."

Nicholls comments: "This could explain the line in Bag of Bones that goes,
Perhaps in dreams everyone is a novelist."

During an interview with Naomi Epel for her book Writers Dreaming, King described his use of dreams this way:

"I've always used dreams the way you'd use mirrors to look at something you couldn't see head-on, the way that you use a mirror to look at your hair in the back. To me that's what dreams are supposed to do. I think that dreams are a way that people's minds illustrate the nature of their problems. Or maybe even illustrate the answers to their problems in symbolic language."

[Anne Rice, another leading horror writer, also noted she uses dreams -- both fortuitous ones and those more intentionally provided for her books.]

Sources: Interview with Stan Nicholls, SFX Magazine no 45; December 1998
Writers Dreaming: 26 Writers Talk About Their Dreams and the Creative Process , Naomi Epel, 1994
The Committee of Sleep, D. Barrett, 2001

http://www.brilliantdreams.com/product/famous-dreams.htm

http://www.brilliantdreams.com/index.html

Interested in dreams and their meanings? Read more from Connecting Hypnotherapy HERE

7 Common Dreams and What They Mean

While some people, including medical researchers, believe dreams are a benign, meaningless byproduct of sleep, many medical experts, psychologists, and psychiatrists, not to mention poets, musicians, and visual artists, believe dreams hold the key to our emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. Sometimes, our dreams are complex, weird, and impossible to describe once we’re awake. But then there are common dreams that many people experience, including dreams of being chased, of falling, or of being naked in public. But what exactly is the meaning behind these familiar dreams? Here are seven common dreams with interpretations we sourced from dream analysts, psychotherapists, and self-proclaimed psychics.

1. Teeth Falling Out

Nothing you dream about is meant to be taken literally. So the dream that your teeth are falling out, a dream common among children as well as adults, is a symbolic representation that might mean a few different things. Some believe that this dream indicates you said something that you should have kept to yourself. Others believe this dream expresses a fear of growing old, or becoming a more mature adult and taking on a new level of responsibility.

2. Being Chased

Who doesn’t love a good chase scene? When we dream we’re being chased, the feeling can be exhilarating or terrifying, depending on who we think is chasing us. Often in such a dream, we have no idea, we just know we’d better bolt or else we’re going to get caught and then who knows what will happen? The basic interpretation of this dream says that in your waking life, you are avoiding something that you need to confront, like a situation at work, for instance, or a heart-to-heart with a friend or family member. Or the dream might mean that you are afraid that something from your past is going to catch up with you. Or maybe you should just quit watching Jason Bourne movies before bed.

3. You're Back in School

The saying goes something like, “Life is just like high school with money.” If you find yourself dreaming that you’re back in high school, only this time, your schoolmates are a combination of co-workers, Jason Bourne, and your mother, take heart; your unconscious mind may be telling you that if you pay attention in real life, you will succeed. At the same time, the dream might indicate that lately, you’ve been feeling uncertain and unprepared, either for the demands of your job or personal life. Now if in the same dream, your teeth fall out, it’s time to call a psychoanalyst.

4. Flying

Dreams where you fly like a bird or Superman generally indicate you’re feeling confident and happy in your waking life. Some cultures offer fussier interpretations, depending on whether you’re flying as yourself or have turned into a bird or some kind of mythological winged creature. We should note, however, that people who consume codeine products may dream that they are flying or have left their body and are observing themselves from above, which is a little more unnerving than dreaming that by flapping your arms you can avoid the Monday morning traffic jam.

5. Naked

Sigmund Freud wrote in his book On Dreams, “The dream is not senseless, not absurd … it is a psychic phenomenon of full value, and indeed the fulfillment of a wish.” So how would Freud explain the very common dream where the dreamer is in public, at work or at some formal occasion, and is partially or entirely naked? This is one of those dreams where, when you wake up, you are forever grateful it was just a dream! Psychoanalysts believe this is a dream about feeling inadequate and unprepared for an upcoming event, or life in general. However, some cultures believe this dream means you’re going to come into money, through a lottery or some other kind of gambling. Dream you’re naked? When you wake up, check your stock portfolio or go buy a Powerball ticket!

6. Falling

The sensation of falling from a great height isn’t pleasant, unless you have a parachute. Dreams where you are falling from the sky or from out of a window can simply mean you feel you’re failing (or “falling”) in your personal or professional life. Feelings of isolation or that you lack emotional support can also inspire this common dream.

7. Lost

The psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote, “I know that if we meditate on a dream sufficiently long and thoroughly … something almost always comes of it.” Dreams where you are lost, perhaps within the halls of a school filled with lockers or outside on the streets of a strange city are pretty straightforward in their symbolism and indicate you’ve been feeling confused and insecure. Like all of the dreams we’ve described, the dream of being lost can mean many more things, depending upon what’s going on in your conscious life. If you’re experiencing stress at work or are getting ready to make some life changes, try meditating upon your dreams to see if they are trying to tell you something helpful.

Courtesy of our friends at Online Psychology Degreehttp://www.onlinepsychologydegree.net/2012/08/08/7-common-dreams-and-what-they-actually-mean/

What do you think of these dream 'translations'? Do they match your own experiences/ideas?

What is Lucid Dreaming? How Can We Control Our Dreams?

‘Lucid dreaming’ is the type of dream we have when we are fully conscious we are dreaming and not awake, unlike regular dreams when we are only aware of the dream after we wake up. This level of conscious state when dreaming allows us to be in control of the storyline of the dream and it is therefore possible to do whatever we like as if we were in some kind of virtual reality.

To the vast majority this type of dreaming is very rare, not least because when it is realised that a dream is indeed a dream and not reality it is usually enough to wake us up! When I was a young teenager I tried immensely hard to have lucid dreams each night in hope that it would be something I could master. No matter how much mental effort I put into the practice, the second I realised I was dreaming the dream disappeared and I was awake again. Very frustrating. But there is a method to succeed…

In a previous post I wrote about the make-up of dreams, how often they occur and when they are remembered (read it here). The key thing to understand is that dreams take place regularly every time you sleep, it just depends on when you wake up if you are to remember the dream or not. If you wake up during a dream you remember it, if you wake up after the dream cycle has finished you probably won’t. So delving into your dreams is more about memory than actually dreaming, as dreaming occurs frequently and naturally for everyone.

How to remember? A dream diary is the easiest way to begin. Keep a notebook and pen by your bed (or wherever you chose to sleep) and the moment you wake up write down as many notes as you can on the dreams you had, if you wake up during the night with the dream in your head turn the light on and do the same thing. The more often you do this the more your mind will improve its recall and before too long you will be writing in more detail and delving much deeper into your subconscious than you ever were before (an article on that topic here).

Another method is to program your mind into remembering on its own. Before you sleep sit comfortably with your eyes close and breathe deeply for as long as it takes to deeply relax. When you have found a good level of relaxation repeat several times in your mind or even out loud a phrase such as the following ‘I will remember all my dreams in vivid detail’ and then go to sleep. You may very well be surprised at the powerful effect this will have on your memory recall.

When you get to the stage where dreams are being remembered to a satisfactory level and you want to step up to the next level and control your dreams, know first of all that you are on the right path. Controlling the mind through meditation and self-hypnosis allows for a greater mastery of altered mental states such as dreaming. You can change your repeated phrase to ‘I will remember all my dreams in vivid detail and will be in total conscious control of my dreams for as long as I wish to remain there for’. This message will be transferred to the subconscious mind and will work in the same way dream recall did. Sometimes having a goal for the dream helps too, if you want to fly in your dreams, program your mind to dream about flying by telling yourself this is what you want to do and even visualise the experience in as much detail as you can. The subconscious can create anything you wish it to so long as the motivation and will to succeed exists alongside the resolve to make it happen.  

To stay conscious in a dream you must master being conscious in the waking state also. Daydreaming is something that has always affected me, but by performing a small ritual I remind myself that I am wide awake and in control, and this can help keep my mind in focus. My ritual is to make the ‘Ok’ sign with thumb and forefinger while repeating in my mind ‘I am totally aware and conscious’ and this prevents me from drifting away and not concentrating on what I'm supposed to be doing...like blogging. I have performed this ritual in dreams sometimes but instead of waking me up it allows me to be more conscious and in control of my dreams.

If you follow these steps dream recall and lucid dreaming will follow so long as you stay consistent with your practice and don’t give in. The more you do the easier it will get like most things in life, but you must keep trying if you want to succeed, and if you do succeed the rewards can be fantastic.

Dreaming is entering into your own subconscious mind and by controlling dreams your conscious is directly tapping into your subconscious deeper than any other known method (similar to hypnosis in many ways). You can uncover forgotten memories, live out fantasies, make life decisions and answer questions in a way you simply could not do ordinarily. There are no boundaries in dreams and to control them is like one big adventure you can enjoy each and every night while learning more about yourself along the way.

What are Dreams...and What do they Mean?

What are dreams? What do my dreams mean? What are my dreams telling me? These are very common questions we ask ourselves, from early childhood right through our lives in all likelihood. They scare us, they excite us, they inspire us, they can confuse us altogether...but why are dreams such a mystery?

Dreams have been studied and considered for thousands of years, but the truth is there are still not many ‘hard facts’ about dreams as science has not yet found a way to accurately measure their content, and is the reason why we have to rely on theories to explain something that plays such a strange role in our lives. It has been said that we spend around 6 years of our lives in dreaming state, a state often feeling so real we have no idea we are dreaming until we wake up. In dreams we feel pain, pleasure, fear, happiness – in fact every emotion possible in a form as real as we would in our ordinary waking life. The question is why do we feel these things and can these dreams have meaning?

The brain has been studied rigorously when asleep, with brainwaves being recorded through our 8 hours of nocturnal bliss. There have been four main stages identified in sleep when the brain works at different speeds, or cycles. The first three stages are different depths of sleep (N1, N2, N3) while the fourth stage has been names REM (Rapid Eye Movement) due to the quick movement the eyes make at the onset of this level. It is known that dreaming takes place during REM as when subjects were woken up in experimentation during the fourth stage they would always report being mid-dream.

Studies suggest that we dream every single night we sleep (when we reach REM that is, during a short nap not necessarily) and we skip through our sleep cycles every 60-90 minutes, therefore dreaming several times per night for periods as long as 20 minutes at a time. Whether we remember the dream or not is dependent on the stage of sleep we wake up in. Like in the studies those who are awoken in REM remember their dreams, while those awoken in the different stages don’t necessarily and sometimes never at all, although it is reported that you can train yourself to remember your dreams using various different methods (I can account for this myself).

In ancient times dreams were relied upon as interaction with the Gods or the dead, a supernatural world that was some kind of split reality from our own where messages of importance would be delivered (see ‘The Bible’) as well as warnings of the future foreseen. In other times nightmares were connected with contact with the devil while pleasant dreams with Gods or angels. In history dreams were considered highly important and served as messages or instructions to use in waking life, but those feelings towards dreams did not last.

Later, especially in western culture, dreams began to lose importance and became thought of as meaningless until Sigmund Freud wrote about their importance to psychology. Freud thought that dreams represented the innermost desires of the individual and were highly important in understanding the workings of the mind. Fritz Perls had similar thoughts to Freud but believed that every aspect of a dream was a representation of oneself, if someone was having a dream about an angry monster for example, that monster would represent an aspect of their own mind, perhaps anger or fear that was being projected by the subconscious mind.

There are also modern theories that dreams actually have no meaning at all and that they are just some kind of scrambled version of memories and emotions unwinding as we sleep, the brain untangling itself after a day filled of multi-sensory absorption. The one main problem I have with these theories is that they don’t seem to offer explanation to recurring dreams and nightmares, dreams with near identical structure or themes that we don’t seem to have control over and cannot shake off. Recurring nightmares can cause considerable stress and create immense frustration. Are these dreams without meaning and simply a process of memory/emotion? I find that very hard to believe.

Fritz Perls and successive gestalt psychologists/hypnotherapists such as Randal Churchill, have had great success using dream therapy, analysing dreams as projections of subconscious issues in order to fix problems in their client’s lives. Recurring dreams would be seen as subconscious problems that have not been dealt with, perhaps repressed feelings that the conscious mind has not overcome and the subconscious mind is continually pushing to be dealt with. During dream therapy the issues would be explored and dealt with, and after such work the recurring dream/nightmare will typically cease, with the individual reporting a great sense of relief and a feeling of being able to move on in their life. Is this proof enough that dreams are not simply scrambled memories?

I have seen this for myself first hand. I had a recurring dream for a number of years surrounding a childhood friend who would inexplicably enter into my dreams on a regular basic. It wasn’t distressing but it did make me wonder why he was there, and filled me with a sense of frustration. It wasn’t until I fully explored my feelings of guilt surrounding this particular friendship and circumstances surrounding it that the friend disappeared from my sleep! It was actually quite a wonderful experience to have my personal mystery solved. I have since worked with clients myself as a hypnotherapist and have found similar results, and not just with recurring dreams. Every dream has themes that can be explored and these are always of interest and of use to the dreamer so long as they are open and willing to delve deep enough.

In conclusion it is my strong opinion that dreams are a clear view of what is going on in your deepest state of mind; a strong connection to the subconscious. These messages from your subconscious can certainly be worked with to help further understand the mind and the way that it behaves. The subconscious mind works in mysterious ways that we cannot fully explain yet, but we can see the results of dream therapy enough to conclude that key inner feelings are brought to the surface in our dreams, which can then be dealt with to improve our REAL waking lives.

In short dreams can be used to help make us happier. In that respect dreams are very important to our lives and it would be ignorant to pass them off as meaningless without exploring even a little deeper beneath the surface.

What do you think about your own dreams? Is there something you find hard to explain? Please feel free to leave a comment, or if you would prefer email me at healnowtherapy@hotmail.co.uk

On the internet there are many 'dream translation' guides, such as this one http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/ Some people find these interpretations of dreams helpful, and many dreams can have similar symbolic meaning for everyone, ie fear etc, but I think it is important to point out that dreams are immensely personal and so for instance if two people dream about a cat, the cat can represent two very different things to either person. We are all unique and have a unique representation of the world around us, so it is only you who can confirm for certain what different aspects of your dream truly mean, and not a generic description.