Post by Kirree on Apr 24, 2004 11:01:43 GMT -5
1. I never dream.
You may say this, but you don't really mean it, because if you never dreams, how would you know what a dream was? What you probably mean is that you don't remember your dreams, but if you keep getting asked, you'll probably admit that you remember some fragment of some dream, usually from your childhood. Dreaming is a universal condition, occuring during certain phases of the sleep cycle every night
2. I dream only once a night.
How do you know? More likely, you only remember one dream a night - probably the closest to awakening. You enter "REM," or rapid eye movement, stage of sleep about four or five times every night; that's when most dreams occur. Since each dream may actually be a series of linked fragments, the number of dreams could be quite vast, but you are likely to have at least four dreams during any given night.
3. I'm incapable of remembering my dreams.
More likely, you haven't tried very hard, you aren't getting a lot of sleep, or else you're drinking a great deal of alcohol, which would be alarming. Certainly, there are people who have a harder time remembering their dreams than others, and everyone goes through periods when they're not remembering their dreams. But if you work at it, you can and will remember your dreams.
4. If you die in your dream, you'll die in real life.
OK, why? This is one of those supersitions that doesn't make any sense. How would we know if it were true, anyway? We'd have to ask every dying person if they dreamed of their death the previous night. Probably a few of them did - would that be a big surprise? But they're not dying because they knew they were dying. Dreams sometimes seem to predict events but there is no formula saying that if you dream about something it will happen. Any book that tries to make dreams behave like mathematical equations is wrong or silly or a cheat.
5. Dreams are just about sex.
This is one of those ideas that people get when they have heard about dream theories but haven't actually read any. If you say this, you are probably thinking of Sigmund Freud, the famous founder of moder psychiatry. Freud believed that dreams very often contain buried sexual symbols. But many dreams theorists are skeptical of this idea, and even Freud neve said that dreams are only about sex. Sexual fantasies, fears, and wishes sometimes appear in dreams - it would be pretty astonishing if they didn't - but dreams are not all about or only about anything.
6. Telling someone your dreams will just show you how messed up you are!
This assumes that you're messed up (well, maybe you are, but that's none of my business). Dreams aren't messages in secret code that someone can decode and say "Aha! Your dream about being strapped into a chair and forced to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger movies means you want to kill your history teacher." Telling someone your dreams is a tricky business, thought, because dreams are both private and not-so-private, and a lot of people have preconceived ideas about them. So, just as you wouldn't read your diary aloud to anyone, you need to be careful about how and with whom you share your dream life.
7. Dreams never did anyone any good.
Usually, when people say things like this they mean that worrying about the strange and sometimes frightening world of dream images is a waste of time. And if you think so, that's OK. No one should be forced to think about their dreams. But dreams inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein, they inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to write The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, they inspired the World War II hero General George Patton to attack Nazi forces by night, they inspired German chemist Friedrich Kekule to solve the riddle of molecular structure of benzene, and they inspiried Dimitri Mendelyev to create the periodic table of the elements. And dreams have shown the way out of innumberable personal dilemmas, pointing thousands of people just like you in intriguing new directions.
8. Dreams aren't real anyway!
This is just another way of shrugging off something you don't understand. It's like saying, "Books aren't real, so why bother to read?" or "Music isn't what life's about, so why bother to listen?" But books are real; you can hold them in your hands and feel them. And though the stories they contain may not actually have happened, they tell us things about the world that traveling around in your car will never tell you, just as music informs us about how life feels far better than any conversation. The pioneering psychologist Havelock Ellis said, "Dreams are real while they last, can we say more about life?"
Source: The Dreamer's Companion by Stephen Phillip Policoff
You may say this, but you don't really mean it, because if you never dreams, how would you know what a dream was? What you probably mean is that you don't remember your dreams, but if you keep getting asked, you'll probably admit that you remember some fragment of some dream, usually from your childhood. Dreaming is a universal condition, occuring during certain phases of the sleep cycle every night
2. I dream only once a night.
How do you know? More likely, you only remember one dream a night - probably the closest to awakening. You enter "REM," or rapid eye movement, stage of sleep about four or five times every night; that's when most dreams occur. Since each dream may actually be a series of linked fragments, the number of dreams could be quite vast, but you are likely to have at least four dreams during any given night.
3. I'm incapable of remembering my dreams.
More likely, you haven't tried very hard, you aren't getting a lot of sleep, or else you're drinking a great deal of alcohol, which would be alarming. Certainly, there are people who have a harder time remembering their dreams than others, and everyone goes through periods when they're not remembering their dreams. But if you work at it, you can and will remember your dreams.
4. If you die in your dream, you'll die in real life.
OK, why? This is one of those supersitions that doesn't make any sense. How would we know if it were true, anyway? We'd have to ask every dying person if they dreamed of their death the previous night. Probably a few of them did - would that be a big surprise? But they're not dying because they knew they were dying. Dreams sometimes seem to predict events but there is no formula saying that if you dream about something it will happen. Any book that tries to make dreams behave like mathematical equations is wrong or silly or a cheat.
5. Dreams are just about sex.
This is one of those ideas that people get when they have heard about dream theories but haven't actually read any. If you say this, you are probably thinking of Sigmund Freud, the famous founder of moder psychiatry. Freud believed that dreams very often contain buried sexual symbols. But many dreams theorists are skeptical of this idea, and even Freud neve said that dreams are only about sex. Sexual fantasies, fears, and wishes sometimes appear in dreams - it would be pretty astonishing if they didn't - but dreams are not all about or only about anything.
6. Telling someone your dreams will just show you how messed up you are!
This assumes that you're messed up (well, maybe you are, but that's none of my business). Dreams aren't messages in secret code that someone can decode and say "Aha! Your dream about being strapped into a chair and forced to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger movies means you want to kill your history teacher." Telling someone your dreams is a tricky business, thought, because dreams are both private and not-so-private, and a lot of people have preconceived ideas about them. So, just as you wouldn't read your diary aloud to anyone, you need to be careful about how and with whom you share your dream life.
7. Dreams never did anyone any good.
Usually, when people say things like this they mean that worrying about the strange and sometimes frightening world of dream images is a waste of time. And if you think so, that's OK. No one should be forced to think about their dreams. But dreams inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein, they inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to write The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, they inspired the World War II hero General George Patton to attack Nazi forces by night, they inspired German chemist Friedrich Kekule to solve the riddle of molecular structure of benzene, and they inspiried Dimitri Mendelyev to create the periodic table of the elements. And dreams have shown the way out of innumberable personal dilemmas, pointing thousands of people just like you in intriguing new directions.
8. Dreams aren't real anyway!
This is just another way of shrugging off something you don't understand. It's like saying, "Books aren't real, so why bother to read?" or "Music isn't what life's about, so why bother to listen?" But books are real; you can hold them in your hands and feel them. And though the stories they contain may not actually have happened, they tell us things about the world that traveling around in your car will never tell you, just as music informs us about how life feels far better than any conversation. The pioneering psychologist Havelock Ellis said, "Dreams are real while they last, can we say more about life?"
Source: The Dreamer's Companion by Stephen Phillip Policoff
