The Dream Sharing Sourcebook: A Practical Guide to Enhancing Your Personal Relationships (5 page)

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Authors: Phyllis R. Koch-Sheras

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BOOK: The Dream Sharing Sourcebook: A Practical Guide to Enhancing Your Personal Relationships
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on the cheek. She smiles that really great smile that lights up her whole face. He looks deeply into her sparkling blue eyes. He feels very much in love. He can smell the grass in the meadow. There is a shrill noise.
It is Jim's telephone. He realizes that his eyes are closed. He opens them and answers the call. It's Randy in shipping asking about an order that went out yesterday.
Usually we think of dreams as stories that come to us while we are deeply asleep at night or during a restful afternoon nap. But daydreams and fantasies such as Jim's are dreams as well. In fact, there are many ways of dreaming. Some occur while we are asleep; others may happen when we are fully awake. Some dreams catch us by surprise, while others we actually "design" for ourselves. Dreams include not only our nocturnal imaginings, but also our daydreams, guided fantasies, and "visioning" dreams, that is, actively created visions that we invent on purpose to set our sights on some future goal.
Webster's New World Dictionary
lists several definitions for the word
dream
, the most common being "a sequence of sensations, images, thoughts, etc., passing through the sleeping person's mind." And although this usually refers to what happens during sleep, it can also refer to the kind of free-floating mental wanderings that take place during three waking states:
In meditation or guided imagery, the dreamer allows the mind to wander to a particular setting or favorite location.
During a daydream or waking dream, the dreamer may be fully conscious but may "lose herself" in vivid fantasy.
In "visioning," the dreamer actively imagines the present or future as she or he would like it to be.
 
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Dreams, then, can take many forms. Each may involve a kind of memory and imagination. Some are images that come to us while we are sleeping, and some while we are wide awake or dozing. Some occur to us when we are not expecting to dream, and others we make up from our own creative capacities. In this book, we discuss three basic categories: dreams, daydreams, and visioning dreams, or visions.
Dreams
Dreams as a part of sleep have been the subject of a considerable amount of contemporary research and writing about these action-packed movies that play in our heads. Human interest in dreams and their meanings, however, have been the subject of keen attention for thousands of years. Priests and seers with a talent for dream interpretation were considered divinely gifted, as were the dreamers of especially significant dreams. In ancient Mesopotamia, one of the world's earliest civilizations, dreams were interpreted as messages from the gods. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato, Horace, and Virgil believed dreams could be prophetic. Dreams figure prominently in religious texts such as the Bible and the Talmud. And even Tibetan Buddhists and Native Americans still center certain rituals and beliefs around these nightly occurrences.
What do dreams mean? As civilization marched slowly toward the twentieth century, the Christian belief that dreams were the work of the devil began to dominate Western thinking, and dream theory receded into the background. But with the advent of modern psychology, dream interpretation again came into vogue, though this time the experts believed the answers revealed not a message from the gods but a message from the dreamer's own psyche.
 
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In 1900, Sigmund Freud published
The Interpretation of Dreams
. In its day, the book caused quite a scandal due to its author's radical thinking. Freud believed dreams came from the unconscious, the part of the mind that hides and holds back memories and desires. Dreams, he theorized, provided a much-needed release valve for sexual and aggressive impulses that were too strong even to admit consciously. Freud tended to see everything in sexual terms: a dream about tumbling down a hill, for example, would represent falling to sexual temptation. Why not just dream about an actual sexual experience? Freud believed the mind converted these unexpressed wishes into dream symbols to make them easier for the psyche to handle.
Since that time, theorists and researchers have built on, argued against, and even attempted to disprove completely Freud's ideas about what, if anything, our dreams are trying to tell us. Carl Jung, a colleague of Freud's, suggested that archetypal figures in dreamskings, queens, witches, devils, mothers and fatherslinked us to the "collective unconscious" that connects all human experience. Both men believed that only trained psychoanalysts such as themselves were qualified to uncover the "latent," or underlying, content of dreams.
Departing from this belief, psychologist Calvin Hall, who collected more than 10,000 dreams, began to note that most dream content contained everyday objects and situations, usually the "day residue" of recent experience. He believed dreams could reveal essential components of the dreamer's worldview, and that the dreamer could puzzle through the dream content to discover evidence of these components. Frederick S. "Fritz" Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, also differed from Freud and company. For Perls, every part of the dream represents a part of the dreamerthe monster part of yourself, the little child part of yourself, the boss part of your-
 
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self, and so forth. Perls maintained that no outside interpreter could be as accurate as the dreamer at discovering what one's dreams mean.
But do dreams mean anything at all? The answer depends on your point of view. Whereas ancient physicians such as Hippocrates and Galen used their dreams to help determine treatment options for their patients, modern-day neuroscientists postulate that dreams are nothing more than the random firing of neurons that we think with and experience during our waking life. Harvard University's J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, says these arbitrary neurochemical signals are without any meaning, and to look for hidden meanings is fruitless. Researcher Jonathan Winson, investigating links between our nerve activity during the day and our dreams when we sleep, discovered that in rats, the patterns of response to stimuli during the day are repeated during REM sleep at night. As for humans, we're still not sure. But this does seem to suggest, says Winson, that dreams play a part in committing our day's experiences to memory.
What Do We Do When We Dream?
"I don't dream," many people say. And a lot of people believe it. But they're wrong. Whether they remember or not, everyone dreams every night, for a total of about two hours. This revelation often surprises people. Another curious fact is that dreaming takes place not while the body is in its most restful state, but during a period when the heart is beating faster and breathing becomes rapid and shallowphysical signs of activity or anxiety, not relaxation.
Over the years scientists have documented the body's functions during sleep and have made some surprising discoveries. In 1953, the first of these findings would forever change our
 
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knowledge of dreams. Graduate student Eugene Asirinsky was working in the sleep lab at the University of Chicago when he noticed the brain waves fluctuating widely on a machine hooked up to a sleeping infant. Looking down at the child's face, he noticed the baby's eyes rolling underneath its lids, as though it were watching a movie. This led to the conclusion that rapid eye movement, or REM, was associated with dreaming. Related studies documented regular periods of sleeping and dreaming, putting to rest the myth that dreams occurred at random times as the result of eating spicy foods, hot or cold room temperatures, or environmental factors such as noise or odor. A 1993 University of Iowa study confirmed the body's dreaming condition to be much like that of the fight-or-flight response that readies the body for a threatening situation.
The Sleep Cycle
Most of us have a regular bedtime routine: locking up, turning off the lights, perhaps setting out our clothes, or taking the dog out for a final time. We wash our faces, brush our teeth, and settle in for the night, usually at around the same hour of the evening. The routine continues the moment we lose consciousness and move from the alpha state of relaxation to actually being asleep. Here's what happens.
Stage One of sleep begins. Your muscles lose tension, your breathing becomes regular, and your pulse slows down.
After a few minutes, Stage Two begins. Images from your day, mixed with nonsense words and pictures, begin flitting through your mind. Researchers call these minidreams hypnagogic dreams, or dreamlets. You may resist falling more deeply asleep at this point, and your body may jerk you back to being awake. But you usually drift back into unconsciousness, and move on toward Stage Three. Deeper, deeper, deeper. Your mus-
 
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cles go totally loose, you inhale and exhale slowly, rhythmically. Your heart rate decreases, and your blood pressure along with it. Now you are fully asleep.
The deepest, most restful period of sleep, Stage Four sleep, is also the longest period in the cycle. If someone wakes you during Stage Four, you will feel fuzzy and disoriented.
These four stages of sleep take about an hour and a half to unfold. Dreaming begins in the REM period after the first ninety-minute cycle is complete, during the second Stage Two period. After fifteen to thirty minutes of dreaming, your mind and body continue the cycle, dreaming again the third time you get to Stage Two. As each REM period ends, your body goes back through Stages One through Four every ninety minutes or so until you awaken. During REM sleep, your thoughts generally are very vivid, emotional, and dramatic, and include visual images that play out a fairly coherent story. Despite all this brain activity and the rapid movement of the eyes, the body is in a fairly rigid state during REM sleep. Though you may likely move while asleep, once you start dreaming, you are incapable of movingat least voluntarily. (Thus sleepwalking, contrary to popular opinion, occurs only during non-REM stages of sleep.)
Lucid Dreams
Are daydreams and visioning dreams the only types of dreams during which the dreamer is aware of what is taking place? Not necessarily. During their night dreams, some people know they are dreaming. Perhaps you have had this experience. In your dreams, you suddenly think something like,
This is just a dream I'm having
. This experience, called lucid dreaming, can be jarring enough to snap us into wakefulnessespecially if the dream is emotionally intense. But some people can consciously move around in their dreams without waking up. In lucid
 
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dreams, the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming even while the dream is taking place as in the following dream:
Hurry, Hurry!
I am in a restaurant on the beachin Hawaii, I think. The food is great, and I am waiting for the waitress to bring dessert. I think to myself, this is a dream I am having. Please bring the last course, or I am going to wake up before I get to eat it! I stand up to look for the server.
The dreamer has choice and power and can therefore explore the mysteries of his or her own unconscious mind. For example, he might be able to ask unrecognized strangers who they are, or ask them to give him a gift or some important advice. This insider's view is why the lucid dream, more than any other type of sleeping dream, can provide insight into the dreamer's own wishes, desires, and fears. Lucid dreaming may even help solve problems in waking life if the dreamer can ask questions while asleep or even right after waking up.
Problem-Solving Dreams
History has recorded a number of cases where ideas from the previous night's dream activity are carried over into the next day's creative projects, or problem-solving activities during the day find their way into that night's sleeping dreams. The inventor of the sewing machine, for instance, was unable to devise a way to get his machine to push a long needle through fabric until he dreamed one night he was being pursued by natives carrying spears. When he remembered this dream, the most interesting thing he noted was that the spearheads had holes in them. Eureka! He then applied this ''spear'' design to his needle prototype. If the eye of the sewing machine needle could be at

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