Thursday, August 16, 2012

Dreams


Dream:
Dreams are our ideas, emotions, sensations that occur in mind during our sleep.  Dreams can be extraordinarily vivid or very vague; filled with joyful emotions or frightening imagery; focused and understandable or unclear and confusing. Many dreams involve a level of visual perceptions put forth by your brain while you sleep. These images, in many cases, evolve into some kind of a story.

Why do we dream?
Some researchers suggest that dreams serve no real purpose, while others believe that dreaming is essential to mental, emotional and physical well-being. Many times dreams involve complex emotions and thoughts. If you’ve ever woken up and had a hard time separating your conscious from the dream state, you know how involved dreams can be.

Cultural Importance:
Dreams are considered important, real, and public in some cultures, but absurd, irrational and personal in others.People believe that the gods would demand some pious act, those that contain warnings or revelations, and those that came about through ritual. Whatever category the dream may fall under, however, they  believed that dreams bring messages from the gods. Dreams were a very important, and indeed, sacred part of the culture

Cultures in which dreams are taken seriously accumulate a depth of observations of their dreams, so their beliefs may be of value to understand dreaming. Beliefs people hold about the nature of dreaming ; conventional systems by which people interpret particular dreams; the social context in which dreams are shared (or not shared) and discussed ; and the ways in which dreams are used in practice,especially in curing.

Scientific Reason:
Dreams can take a scary turn. Some people blame dreams on having eaten spicy food before bedtime, but that hasn’t been proven. Fear is the most common emotion involved in dreams however, they can also be coupled with anger, embarrassment or other negative thoughts. Some people feel that if they’ve had an extremely stressful day, that the dreams follow when they fall asleep that night.  Dreams can also affect the sleeper following a traumatic life event. They are more prevalent in children than teenagers and women are more likely to suffer than men.
Common threads that run through dreams are:
  • Being in the midst of a major weather event – hurricane, tornado, flood
  • Being in danger and being unable to move away from it
  • Feeling alone or trapped
Dreams are disturbing because they seem so real and sometimes the memory of them lingers throughout the day. Dreams usually always appear during rapid eye movement sleep. Researchers have found that sleepers who suffer dreams on a recurring, regular basis can suffer ill health effects, such as:
  • Suicidal thoughts
  • Depression and anxiety
  • Sleep avoidance, which can lead to sleep problems
  • Disturbed sleep episodes
If you find yourself suffering from restless nights plagued by dreams and dreams, keep a dream journal as well as a log of your daytime activities and stresses. You may find a connection on your own that will speak to the reasons for your dream-plagued sleep. If you don’t, though you might want to speak with your doctor or a sleep specialist and see if there might be another, underlying reason for your sleep disturbances.

Interesting Facts:
  • You Forget 90% of Your Dreams. Within 5 minutes of waking half of your dream is forgotten. Within 10, 90% is gone
  • People who became blind after birth can see images in their dreams. People who are born blind do not see any images, but have dreams equally vivid involving their other senses of sound, smell, touch and emotion. Every human being dreams
  • Every human being dreams (except in cases of extreme psychological disorder). If you think you are not dreaming – you just forget your dreams.  
  • our mind is not inventing faces – in our dreams we see real faces of real people that we have seen during our life but may not know or remember. We have all seen hundreds of thousands of faces throughout our lives, so we have an endless supply of characters for our brain to utilize during our dreams.
  • Not Everybody Dreams in Color
  •  Dreams speak in a deeply symbolic language. Whatever symbol your dream picks on it is most unlikely to be a symbol for itself.
  • The most common emotion experienced in dreams is anxiety. Negative emotions are more common than positive ones.
  • On average you can dream anywhere from one or two hours every night.
  • Studies have been done on many different animals, and they all show the same brain waves during dreaming sleep as humans. Watch a dog sleeping sometime. The paws move like they are running and they make yipping sounds as if they are chasing something in a dream.
  • Our mind interprets the external stimuli that our senses are bombarded with when we are asleep and make them a part of ourdreams. This means that sometimes in our dreams we hear a sound from reality and incorporate it in a way. For example you may be dreaming that you are in a concert while your brother is playing a guitar during your sleep.
  • Men tend to dream more about other men. Around 70% of the characters in a man’s dream are other men. On the other hand, a woman’s dream contains almost an equal number of men and women. Aside from that, men generally have more aggressive emotions in their dreams than the female lot.
  • Results of several surveys across large population sets indicate that between 18% and 38% of people have experienced at least one precognitive dream and 70% have experienced déjà  vu. The percentage of persons that believe precognitive dreaming is possible is even higher – ranging from 63% to 98%.
  • You can not only have sex as pleasurable as in your real life while dreaming, but also experience an  orgasm  as strong as a real one without any wet results. The sensations felt while lucid dreaming (touch, pleasure and etc..) can be as pleasurable and strong (or I believe even stronger) as the sensations experienced in the real world.

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