Dreams
Have my dreams caused consequences in my life?
What exactly is a dream? We’ve experienced dreams throughout our lives but probably never thought to define what a dream is.
According to Wikipedia, a dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. The Babylonians in the third millennium and even earlier, the ancient Sumerians studied the content and function of dreams. They have been topics of scientific, philosophical, and religious interest throughout recorded history. Dreams occur mainly in the rapid-eye movement (REM) stage of sleep when brain activity is high and resembles being awake.
You may wonder if people who are born without sight have visual dreams. It’s been found that they do not. Their dreams are related to other senses like hearing, touch, smell, and taste, whichever are present since birth.
Calvin S. Hall collected over 50,000 dream reports at Western Reserve University from the 1940s to 1985. In 1966, Hall and Robert Van de Castle published The Content Analysis of Dreams, a book that outlined a coding system to study 1,000 dreams reports from college students. In this study, the most common emotion experienced in dreams was anxiety. Other emotions included abandonment, anger, fear, joy, sex, and happiness.
Negative emotions were much more common than positive ones in dreams.
Only this week, I dreamt I had lost my backpack and was frantically searching for it. During the dream, I felt extreme anxiety and fear. I felt as if I had lost my entire identity. The dream was so powerful that it awakened me, and it took about a minute or two to reestablish reality from this dream state. I had to get out of bed and look at the backpack to get back to sleep.
I’ve had dreams this powerful before. As a student, I used to dream that my completed homework assignment suddenly vanished or that I had forgotten to dress appropriately, causing intense shame in my dreams. Some of you may have experienced similar dreams. This type of dream frequently pops up.
In one interpretation, the dream experience for early humans gave rise to the notion of a human “soul,” a central element in much religious thought. J.W. Dunne, the author of An Experiment with Time, wrote
But there can be no reasonable doubt that the idea of a soul must have first arisen in the mind of primitive man as a result of observation of his dreams. Ignorant as he was, he could have come to no other conclusion but that in dreams, he left his sleeping body in one universe and went wandering off into another. It is considered, but for that savage, the idea of such a thing as a ‘soul’ would never have even occurred to mankind….
Dream interpretation is the process of assigning meaning to dreams. Although associated with some forms of psychotherapy, there is no reliable evidence that understanding or interpreting dreams positively impacts one’s mental health.
In his book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, stated dreams’ function is to preserve sleep by thinking of them as fulfilled wishes that would otherwise awaken the dreamer. Freud also felt that people’s dreams represented repressed thoughts and fantasies.
Carl Jung, the noted psychologist who appeared on the front cover of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, had done many other things, including studying Psychodynamics, which is especially interested in the dynamic relations between conscious motivation and unconscious motivation, dreams included. He described “Big Dreams” as those dreams that may stay with you throughout your life and even change your life’s course.
Here is my Big Dream. The dream came to me during my marriage to my first husband. The scene took place in a horse show arena. A man was leading a magnificent shiny black stallion, its head held high, with a long rope tied around its neck. The man had the other end of the rope. He aimed to “break” the horse into submission by pulling it in a circle around him. And it was working. Gradually, the horse showed signs of fatigue; its head lowered, its shiny coat dulled, and its steps slowed.
The arena was empty, except for three children watching the action from their seats above. The longer it went on, the more frantic the children became. Finally, as their frustration mounted about being unable to stop the action they witnessed in the arena, they turned to the wall behind them. They started pulling the red, yellow, and blue metal wall coverings in strips from the wall.