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In the middle of the night, I was taking a walk through the woods. I could hear owls hooting and animals scattering under leaves. From the vague sound of water trickling over rocks, I knew my destination was coming soon. As I was walking, the heel of my foot got wedged between a stump and a rock. I started to sway and my heart stopped. Slowly I could feel my body fall towards the ground.
Not knowing when I would fall, where I would land, what I would fall on or what might fall on me, made my heart start racing. My body shook and I opened my eyes. I looked around and noticed I was lying in my bed underneath my warm blanket. I had just had a dream but I am now safe in my bed.
My heart settled down, with a sigh of relief, then I laid back down. Almost everyone has had a similar dream as mine, feeling as if you were falling, then awoke. Dreams are caused by your sleeping habits and events that occur throughout your life which you may not be consciously aware of. Your reaction to these happenings may affect the way your brain functions, also affecting your sleeping cycles. This is the reason why some dreams occur and the mood the dreams appear as. Can dreams mean something to you?
Will they help you handle situations you are involved in? How can dreams show a series of events that you may come into contact with? Some of these questions, including many more, people will think about but mysteriously may never be answered. Through research, dreams are not as mysterious as you may believe. Your brain is made up of two hemispheres.
The left sided hemisphere is more dominant than the right side. The left side of your brain organizes your actions, reactions, and experiences in a logically, linearly manor. This order of time and space appears in an expressible language. The dominant side controls your waking life or reality. While dreaming, it is hypothesized or guessed that the right, nondominant side, comes to life, therefore now becoming the dominant side. Our creative / empathic side is then released into a dream.
We experience this at more of a feeling level than a cause and effect or a time and space level. We learn skills from the two and become dependent to manage the two different worlds. Dreams are the products of an unconscious mind. The controlling parts of your mind, your conscious, becomes relaxed and all your thoughts and feelings get stored up, in your unconscious mind.
It obeys its own logic and describes things in its own way. Word pictures are used as a chain of connections. This is why in dreams people do impossible things or shift quickly from scene to scene. Dreams are often unusually vivid in their mood or in what you see.
Sometimes the feelings produced from dreams are so strong that they affect the dreamers mood for the next day. This is known as, waking up on the wrong side of the bed. Many people wonder what dreams are for. The unconscious mind has a method of straightening out experiences. While the conscious part of the mind is in active, the unconscious or your subconscious, will find new facts, situations, worries, fears, desires, and more. All of this new information draws up emotions of your mind and memory.
Visual and emotional images of these feelings are shown to you in a dream. For example, you may have a certain problem in which you are thinking about, but consciously putting it aside. This problem goes into your unconscious, and more than likely, will appear to you in a dream. Sometimes dreams can offer possible solutions to your problem and advise you in different directions. Modern understandings of the nature of sleeping began over forty years ago. In 1952 a researcher noticed sometime during a period of sleep, eyes of the sleeper were seen moving all around their closed eyelids as if watching moving objects.
These motions are called rapid eye movements or REM periods. REM periods appear in phases of sleep in which the sleeper is dreaming. Three years later, two scientists, Eugene Aserinsky and Nathan Klietman, found many different characteristics, in the human body which occur during REM sleep. A couple of characteristics found during REM phases include the flow of the blood and the body temperature increases. A machine known as an electroencephalogram, EEG, is used to test brain wave activity. During sleep, four types of EEGs are being studied: Beta, Alpha, Theta, and Delta waves.
The brain is animated or anxious during the Beta waves. These waves are the fastest of the four. Alpha waves are shown in the periods of meditation or relaxation. Drowsiness and light sleepers can be shown up in Theta waves.
During deep sleeps, the Delta appears. Delta waves are the slowest waves of the four. We enter sleep cycles when we fall asleep. These cycles are repeatedly used several times. The first stage is going from being completely awake to fallen asleep. The second stage is your normal sleep or lightly sleeping.
The third stage is when you have sunk into deep sleep, known as transition. The last and forth stage is your deepest possible sleep. Very quickly, someone will fall into the forth stage of sleep, known as non rapid eye movement or NREM. An hour later, as you enter the REM stage, your dreams will climb through the first three stages, lasting about ten minutes. This will last up to and including eighty up to ninety minutes. The four cycles are repeated and the REM sleep become longer and can last up to an hour.
During an eight-hour sleeping period, we spend around six hours in NREM and about two in REM, or your dream time. If one is awakened during REM sleep, he / she could vividly remember dreams. NREM sleep is really unconscious. These dreams are remembered but seem to be less real. Half of sleepers wake up only from NREM sleep. This is why some say they never dream.
Some psychologists say people unconsciously awake themselves at a time when they are not dreaming to repress what their dreams are saying. There is a difference in the need for NREM sleep and REM sleep. During NREM sleep, the body rests to recreate themselves. Someone will appear tired, clumsy, and sluggish if no NREM sleep is produced. Having no REM sleep, will make someone overly sensitive, unable to concentrate, and cause a person to obtain a bad memory. REM helps someone to cope with stress.
For a person having NREM will be temporarily inconvenient but not having REM will be disturbing. Sleeping tablets and other sedatives, effect REM. From the stimulation, someone can go into too deep of a REM state. This will leave the body delirious when woken up.
Age effects someones sleeping habits. As a baby, most of their sleeping cycles involve dreaming. As a child gets older their cycle shifts. Adults have regular sleeping cycles. Their first period follows after sleeping for almost ninety minutes and will last up to ten minutes, continuing in ninety-minute sessions. The final dream can last as long as forty minutes.
If someone becomes blind but at one time was able to see, the REM state will visualize scenes of events which took place when the dreamer was able to see. Then these visual pictures will slowly diminish. Dreams at this stage will show a REM consisting of touch, smell, sound, and sense of motion. This is how individuals who are born blind dream. Everything in a dream is important to remember for understanding the dreams importance. Vivid colors or repeated colors may show information in meanings due to a reaction they are involved with.
Most dreams contain vague color that will fade fast once the person is awoken. When a problem comes around, everyone has something that will help he / she to handle the situation. In dreams, we can find and reform the resource through a present problem without knowing. These forms are shown through archetypes, symbols, and images.
Archetypes are secret codes, forming a language to form a hidden meaning of dreams. These archetypes make dreams mysterious to the common eye. A different form of archetypes known as archetypal symbols show a more sensible meaning which occur time and time again. For example, in the Garden of Eden, ...
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