Picture this, you are walking down a country road. Everything is nice and peaceful, all of a sudden, you accidentally trip. But something is off…you haven’t hit the ground. You are falling and falling, everything is going black. You see something while falling, it appears to be the ground, but you’re so disoriented that you’re not sure. Then you reach it…and you wake up. That is what we call a falling dream. I have always found the world of dreams interesting. It’s a place where you can do things you couldn’t do in real life. It’s a place where you can have dreams that are pleasant, or dreams that can be nightmares. Today, I will be telling you about three things about dream interpretation…
History of dreams.
1.Dream interpretations date back to 3000-4000 B.C., where they were documented on clay tablets. For as long as we have been able to talk about our dreams, we have been fascinated with them and have strived to understand them.
2.In some primal societies, members were unable to distinguish between the dream world and the waking world. Or they could simply choose not to make the distinction. They saw that the dream world was not only an extension of reality, but that it was a more powerful world.
3.In the Greek and Roman eras, dreams were seen in a religious context. They were believed to be direct messages from the gods or from the dead. The people of that time look to their dreams for solutions on what to do or what course of action to take. They believed dreams forewarned and predicted the future. Special shrines were even built where people can go there to sleep in hopes that a message could be passed to them through their dreams. Their belief in the power of a dream was so strong that it even dictated the actions of political and military leaders. In fact, dream interpreters even accompanied military leaders into battle to help with war strategy.
Common Elements of Dreams
1.To see or talk to the dead in your dream forewarns that you are being influenced by negative people and are hanging around the wrong crowd. This dream may also be a way for you to resolve your feelings with those who have passed on. Alternatively, the dream symbolizes material loss
2.To dream that you fall and are frightened indicates a lack of control, insecurity, and/or lack of support in your waking life. You may be experiencing some major struggle and/or overwhelming problem. It may also imply that you have failed to achieve a goal that you have set forth for yourself.
3.To dream that you feel fear indicates that your achievements will not be as successful as you had anticipated. You are experiencing anxieties in various aspects of your life. The key to overcoming your fear is to discuss them and deal with them openly.
Facts about Dreams
1.The faces you see in dreams are based off of faces you have seen in real life. The human brain is responsible for many complex creations, but it can’t invent the image of people. So the “strangers” that you meet in your dreams actually have the faces of people who you’ve once seen in your real life but forgotten, like your childhood mailman or that guy bumped into on the side walk that one time.
2.You may soon be able to upload dreams to YouTube! Scientists at UC Berkeley have achieved a major milestone in their quest to create a technology that would let us tap into our brain’s imaging systems. They used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models and they succeeded in decoding and reconstructing visual experiences of their test subjects. The tests they ran had people watching a movie trailer. Then, they reconstructed the images using their new technology. While that’s as far as they can do right now, it puts them one step closer to being able to tap into your dreams.
3.Most people over the age of 10 have 4 to 6 dreams every night. Those numbers times 365 days in one year makes for between 1,460 and 2,190 dreams every year. We dream during REM periods (which is when we have Rapid Eye Movement in our sleep) which can range anywhere from 5 minutes to half an hour long. In the course of one night this happens multiple times. “Wait a minute!” you might be thinking, “I don’t remember having 4 different dreams in one night, and I certainly don’t remember having over 1,000 dreams this year.” The fact of the matter is, you forget between 95% to 99% of all the dreams you have. That may seem kind of high, but most of your dreams don’t really interest you enough to make you want to remember them.
The dream world realm is very complex and interesting. I hope that you have learned something today from this speech.