Dreams Life
One of the brain's most astonishing capacities is its ability to create its own images-dreams-without any visual input from the outside world. Whether your sleeping or awake, your brain is constantly at work,communicating messages to you in the form of dreams. Dreams are a communication of body, mind and spirit in a symbolic communicative environmental state of being (Central 103). We dream in order to sort out memories, either adding them to the memory store or thrwoing away unwanted information. It has also been suggested that dreams are an attempt by the brain to make sense of stray thoughts. Essentially, dreams are our method of relaxing and letting our minds drift away into a different world. Your brain, mind and spirit, while at rest "review" and analysis in its own way long term, short term and spirit memory. It kicks around emotions, thoughts, ideas, actions and interactions of the short term memory. All this data as well as your subconcious of what people do and tell you, are all processed as a dream (Central 104). One study of dreaming strongly suggests that it is a primary means by which we form and evaluate our survival strategies. Other sleep studies have shown that dreams and dreaming are essential to o
ur mental health ( Howell 105). Together these sudies emphasize the psychological importance of dreams and dreaming. They show how our consciousness maintains its delicate balance. Ken Howell suggests why consciousness is like a scale balancing one side against another and how dreaming is related : On one side of this mental scale our consciousness weighs its conscious experiences. On the opposite side of our mental scale our consciousness weighs its subconscious experiences. When we give more weight or attention to either side of this mental scale, our consciousness becomes unbalanced. Essentially this is why you dream. Sleeping gives our body a chance to regain its strength. Dreaming gives our consciousness a chance to restore its balance (105). Through dreams our consciousness restores its balances by weighting the subliminal influences affecting our life. Dreams are a subliminal language. They are the language of your subconscious mind (Howell 105). The Bible as well as other great books of historical and revealed religion, shows traces of a general and substantial belief in dreams ( Miller vii). In ancient times, it was thought that dreams were messages from the gods or from demons (Moffett 5). Priests were the only people skilled enough to interpret these dreams. People would travel far distances to visit a temple to get a reading of their dreams (Moffett 5). In many other cultures people believed dreams were presented by an outside force and intended to serve as oracles or omens (Lemley 2). A little later on Greek philosophers furthur bettered dream analysis. The most famous of these Greek philosophers was Aristotle. He spoke of the illusion of 'sense-perception', the malfunctioning of these senses which allows dreams to occur. Aristotle later suggested that dreams are formed by disturbances of the body (History 209). Not until the mid 19th century did another philosopher as great as Aristotle come along. A psychoanalyst by the name of Sigmund Freud truly revolutionized the study of dreams when he said that dreams are created form the images, memories, thoughts, wishes and fears that are stored in a person's brain (Moffett 6). He believed that the analysis of dreams was a very useful and powerful tool in uncovering unconscious thoughts and desires. Freud also believed that "the purpose of dreams is to allow us to satisfy in fantasies the instinctual urges that society judges unacceptable" (History 209). A second illustious investigator of dreams was Carl Jung. Like Freud, Jung analyzed the dreams of his patients in order to explore the otherwise inaccessible regions of the unconscious mind, and he too believed that dreams are largely symbolic (Americana 115). He added to Freuds new approach by saying that dreams are a tool for learning more about ourselves and for achieving our full potential (Moffett 6). Laboratory studies have shown that we experience our most vivid dreams during a type of sleep called Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. Less vivd dreams occur at other times during the night (Common, Dreams 101). Dreams were not studied in the scientific laboratory on any large scale until 1953, when Nathaniel Kleitman and Eugene Aserinsky, at the university of Chicago, reported a momentous observation they mede while watching the eye movements of sleepers (Americana 115). They observed that series of bursts of rapid eye movement occured about four to six times during the night. The first rapid eye movement period took place about an hour after the beginning of sleep and lasted from five to ten minutes. Succeeding REM periods occured at intervals of about ninety minutes each and lasted pr
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2441
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)
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