Dreams

note: I’m pertaining to “dreams” like when we fell asleep -----a series of thoughts, images, or emotions occurring during sleep  not “dreams” like goals in life or wishes & fantasies.

It’s been years since I’d stopped writing down the images I saw in my dreams, those images I believed have occults, and thought they have something to do or have connections that will happen to my life though they were not that clear enough for me to understand. Some stood as warnings while others were answers to my curiosity.

I also have with me my mum  and some friends sharing me their visions through dreams or in a sudden flash, like prophecies they caught a glimpse of what will come though it was not that vivid or not the exact thing to happen but it is similar to things they believed to happen, in some other ways. Aside from that I also heard a lot of testimonies relating to their dreams, dreams that were not just seeing the future but also seeing people, a person talking, a thing, a place, a sign-----anything that might have connection to them; so as soon you will get back to reality and for example see a place you will think you might seen it before-----in your dreams may be. Some even see their selves, and like a mirror it reflects or represents them-----their attitude, or might be the opposite of who they really are.

It fascinates me how could that happen, I mean it is something mysterious. So, how could that happen? Is it really something mysterious?

I did a little research on first, “why we dream?” & here’s what I got:

Brandan Schulze et al from library.thinkquest.org, stated that there is no proven fact on why we dream, which is why there are so many theories on the topic.  There is Freud's theory that dreams carry our hidden desires and there is Jung's theory that dreams carry meaning, although not always of desire, and that these dreams can be interpreted by the dreamer.  After these theories, others continued such as the Cayce theory in that dreams are our bodies means of building up of the mental, spiritual and physical well-being.  Finally came the argument between Evans' theory and the Crick and Mitchinson theory.  Evans states that dreaming is our bodies way of storing the vast array of information gained during the day, whereas Crick and Mitchinson say that this information is being dumped rather than stored.  Whichever theory is true, we may never know, but from these following theories we can decide for ourselves what we believe to be true and further help us into understanding our dreams.

Freud's Theory

            Freud believed that a dream represented an ongoing wish along with the previous days activities.  They may even portray wishes that have been inside us since early childhood.  In fact, he believed, every dream is partially motivated by a childhood wish.  Another interesting idea was that nothing is made up during a dream and that they are biologically determined, derived completely from instinctual needs and personal experiences.

          Probably one of the most interesting ideas among these theories is his theory of dream occurrence.  Dreams occur in a state of "ego collapse" when the demands of the Id (imperative bodily needs) and Superego (conscience ego ideals) converge upon the Ego (personal desires and mediator between the Id and Superego).  In easier terms, a dream will occur when the unconscious wish is bound to the preconscious instead of just being discharged.

          Many of Freud's theories still stand true today, but most of all in the area of defense mechanisms our body uses while we dream.  If our minds have been dealing with too much denial, regression, or repression, it causes an internal conflict, a dream in this case, to take place.  This prevents us from building up intolerable states of psychological tension in waking life.  This is why, if you become too emotional, it actually works to "sleep it off."

According to Jung

          Jung, disagreeing with Freud's theory, quickly developed his own which contradicted Freud's.  Jung believed the most effective method for dream interpretation was the use of series correlation.  Freud didn't even believe interpretation was possible by the dreamer and that dreams could only be interpreted by a trained psychologist.  Jung was the one who gave hope to all dreamers who were looking for the meaning in our dreams without having to hire a "professional."

          Series correlation is a process involving the analysis of dreams over time.  Jung suggested taking similar dreams from you dream journal and merging the dream images together forming a larger dream.  Try and gather these images into your head, he suggested, and from these images determined if there are any waking situations that might be related.  From this information write out a physical action that could be taken based off of the information learned through using this technique.

          Like Freud, Jung categorized the mind into three parts: the collective unconscious, the personal unconscious, and the conscious.  The collective unconscious consists of imbedded deposits of world processes.  It does not depend on personal experience, only the images which are prefigured by evolution.  The personal unconscious is a receptacle or storage mechanism for that which is not contained within the consciousness.  It holds forgotten association, unnoticed experiences, observations, moral questioning, repressed and discarded thoughts, half-thoughts, seemingly irrelevant details, and incongruities.  Finally comes the consciousness, wich develops through sensing, thinking, and intuition.

          When Jung interpreted dreams he found that the most important thing to do was ask yourself questions about the images in your dreams and from these questions, write down all of the associations you can think of.  Here are the questions he would ask himself:

          What is the shape of the image?

          What is the function of the image?

          What alterations does the image go through?

          What does the image do?

          What do you like and dislike about the image?

          What does the image remind you of?

Cayce's Experience

When it came to the idea of dreams having purpose, Cayce's theory was a bit different then the others.  He believed dreaming to be the bodies way of "self edification," which is the building up of the mental, spiritual, and physical well-being.  It was a way of quickening the dreamer to his/her own human potential.  By getting a good nights sleep, any person could develop more mature values, stretch their thinking, and right one's self.

          According to Cayce, there are five different levels that dream's stem from.  These different levels are the body level, subconscious level, level of consciousness, level of superconscious, and the level of the soul.  What they can do for you is anything from presenting messages of your body calling for aid during sickness to stating problems which must be solved within the conscious.

          Cayce believed that if you were to interpret your dreams correctly you must thoroughly study yourself.  Once you know how you feel about dreams and what they can do for you can you begin to study your dreams.  If you have a dream, according to Cayce, it's primary focus is to either solve problems and adapt to external affairs or awakening and alerting the dreamer to new potential within the self.  The first step to Cayce's method of interpretation is to determine which of the two major functions of dreams is the primary focus of the dream.

          The second step is the process of taking inventory.  You need to know your conscious and subconscious mind inside out.  Know future plans, goals, interests, stances, and decisions.  Know your hidden fears, longings, dependencies, and defenses.  Know the cycles, needs, habits, and stresses of the body.  Once you finish with these two steps you can begin to interpret your dreams and decide how they can help you better yourself mentally, physically, and spiritually.

Evans' Organization

          According to Evans, every time we go to sleep our brain disengages from the external world and uses this time to sort through and organize all the information that was taken in throughout the day.  Sleep, especially during REM sleep, is when the brain becomes isolated for the sensory and motor neural pathways.  During this time our data banks and program files are opened and become available for modification on re-organization, based on what happened during the day.

          In this theory, we are not aware of the full array of processing that occurs during REM sleep.  While we dream the brain comes back on-line for a short period of time and the conscious mind is allowed to observe a small sample of the programs that are being run.  The brain attempts to interpret this information in the same way it would during the wakeful state, what is created from these samples of information is a dream.  In a nutshell, dreams are nothing more than a minute amount of the information that is being scanned and sorted during REM sleep.

Crick and Mitchinson's Cleanup

          Crick and Mitchinson base their theory on the fact that the cortex, unlike other parts of the brain, is made up of richly interconnected neuronal networks in which each cell has the capacity to excite it's neighbors.  It is believed that memories are encoded in these networks and when one point of the web is excited a pulse travels through the network prompting recall.  The problem with such network systems is that they malfunction when there is an over load of incoming information.  Too many memories in one network may produce either bizarre associations to a stimulus, which creates our fantasies, the same response whatever the stimulus, creating obsessions, or associations triggered without any stimulus, which creates hallucinations.

          To deal with information overload, the brain needs a mechanism to debug and tune the network.  This debugging mechanism would work best when the system was isolated from extermnal inputs and it would have to have a way of randomly activating the network in order to eliminate spurious connections.  This method, they say, is REM sleep and that the halluinatory quality of dreams is nothing more than the random neural firing needed for the daily cleanup of the network.

          According to this theory, these signals somehow erase the spurious memory associations formed during the previous day and we wake up with the network cleaned up.  They believe that people remembering their dreams could help retain patterns of thought which are better forgotten, the same patterns that your system has attempted to clean out.  This is why, they say, if you don't write down your dreams they will be forgotten because your brain is still working to clear these memories out.

2ndly, I researched on “what dreams for?”

According to Tony Crisp from dreamhawk.com, dreams have also been shown to indicate activities in the body, and so have been used to diagnose illness. They have been used as creative agents, and lie behind a number of scientific discoveries. Writers and artists have found in them inspiration or fresh insights into creativity. For countless thousands of people, they have also been a time travel machine through which glimpses of the past and future were given – or a means of realising that consciousness can roam free of the physical body and witness events at a distance. Many people state they have had meaningful or even verifiable contact with the dead. Dreams also often have deeply spiritual themes, enabling the dreamer to feel contact with a universal existence and timeless aspect of themselves.

There are many definitions of dreams. They range from the ancient view of them being messages from the gods, through the idea of dreams as windows to our unconscious feelings and thoughts, to the modern view of them as neurological and chemical events.

However much one tries to fit the enormous range of dream phenomena into any one or several of these definitions, there is never a complete match.

Therefore dreams, like any life experience are transcendent. They transcend any attempt to give them a final definition. There is always in them an element which remains indefinable.

A cup for instance is in most cases made of a mineral. We can therefore see it as a manufactured object made of clay. But it can also be seen as a piece of art, as a mass of interacting molecules and atoms, as an outcrop of the universal substance, a religious symbol, a technological product. What one is the right description?

Dreams are even more mysterious and likewise have no single useful definition.

For about a third of our life we sleep, and most of that period is spent in one form of dreaming or another (REM or NREM dreaming (1)). This means that if you sleep for an average of seven hours a day and live 75 years, 22 YEARS OF YOUR LIFE ARE SPENT DREAMING.

Human life itself is strange and mysterious, and because dreams display the workings of our mind and imagination, they are among the most mysterious and fascinating aspects of our life. Tony Buzan, writing about the complexity and scope of the human brain, says that even comparing it with the vastness and intricacy of a galaxy is a modest analogy. This is because our three and a half pound brain mass has in it about ten billion nerve cells. Each of these cells can link with any of the others through patterned connections which outnumber in scope the atoms in the universe. As we think, as we experience and feel responses, as creativity expresses, our brain flashes through these unimaginable number of patterned connections thousands of times each second. This is beyond our normal ability to imagine, despite the fact it is happening to us personally. Buzan says, “At a mathematical level alone, the complexity is astounding. There are ten billion neurons in the brain and each one has a potential of connections of 1028 In more comprehensible terms, it means that if the theoretical number of potential connections were to be written out, we would get a figure beginning with 1 and followed by about ten million kilometres of noughts.”

The human mind has immense possibilities. We see the demonstration of this in the extraordinary things people do, either in their everyday life or in times of crisis. We know from laboratory evidence that people can consciously slow down their heartbeat, change the temperature of their body, solve mathematical problems as fast as any computer, heal their body of illness. Dreams, involving the unwilled action of the brain during sleep, express and often unveil something of the vastness of these inner resources.

Lastly, I’ve researched on “is there any mystery on dreams?”

According to Dr. Kathleen S. Pfaff, as she discovered throughout scripture, that all of our dreams are messages from God with a purpose in mind; (to expose negative and positive characteristics), to reveal a mystery about ourselves (hidden agendas, talents, gifts, solutions to a problem, warnings of possible illness, and other things about ourselves which we are unaware of). Dreams also reveal future events, potential danger, as well as healing dreams for both the mind and body.

It is sad that among the Christian population there are few who acknowledge the value of their dreams because of ignorance, fear and paranoia which still resides in the church today. We are the population which should be heads above occult religions in the arena of spiritual wisdom, but sadly I find it to be the reverse. It is God the Father who is the Founder and Creator of the "dream language." It began with Abraham in Genesis, appearing throughout the entire New Testament, and has not stopped to this current day.

In fact, dreams should be honored, not ridiculed. Dreams are given to us for the purpose of Spiritual growth, communication with God and healing the soul. If the Prophets of the Old Testament had ignored their visions and dreams, our Bible would never have been written and our Savior would never have lived past the age of two. If Mary's husband, Joseph, had ignored his dream, warning him to flee to Egypt with his family, Jesus would have been killed by the command of Herod.

Without Joseph's prophetic dreams of honor, would he have withstood so much persecution for so many years (Genesis 37:5-9)? Without a vision, would Mary have agreed to her pregnancy, (Luke 1:26-38)? Without a vision, would Moses have risked his life to free the Jewish people from Egypt, (Exodus chapters 3-4)? And what about John's vision of Revelations? Without the prophecies from Isaiah, David, Joel, (and others), would we have recognized the messiah? These are but a few examples listed in the Bible of people who heard from God through a vision or dream and acted upon it.

Dreaming and Prophecy have not stopped, but instead we are witnessing an increase as Joel predicted it would.

"I will pour out my spirit on ALL PEOPLE. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams..."

                                  -Joel 2:28-32