Go To To Bed; Get A Good Night's Dream

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Everybody talks about "the dream I had （http://www.watchcopiez.com/）last night." In fact, dreams and dream interpretations have been acknowledged from the beginning of recorded history. Biblical Joseph interpreted a dream of Egypt's Pharaoh that saved the country from famine. Freud used dreams in an attempt to solve people's psychological troubles. Artists/writers Federico Fellini, John Keats, August Strindberg, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ingmar Bergman, and Anais Nin have all used dreams in their works."Dreams are a vehicle for knowledge not open to the waking mind," declared Robert Abrams, University of Washington assistant professor of English, who taught a class on dreams and literature last year. "In some ways, our dreams may be smarter than we are," he continued. "Our waking conscious mind is culturally contaminated, constricted"—by things like media and current morality.Nineteenth-century writers—the Romantics—were fascinated by dreams and encouraged people to look inward and be more receptive to irrationality, according to Abrams. They believed that the greatest minds' should have ...
... a negative capability—the ability to be in doubt, mystified, or uncertain without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.Ignoring the Romantics, the 20th-century psychologists, psychiatrists, and doctors have come up with2 some startling facts about dreams:Everybody dreams every night (with few exceptions).Some don't remember.Everybody dreams in color; if awakened in the middle of a dream, you will report it in brilliant techni color, but if awakened 15-plus minutes 3 after a dream, you may remember the dream, but in black and white. The more time that elapses after a dream, the more the color fades.Most people dream about 20 minutes out of every hour andone half. Dreams have been shown to take about as much time asevents would take in waking life.A dream may last up to 20 minutes, or you could have several during the 20 minute dreaming phase.You dream more toward morning as you enter into lighter phases of sleep.Depressants like alcohol or barbiturates can suppress dreamphases.Dream-deprived people become irritable, anxious, less tolerant in stressful and emotional situations.During nightly dream phases, our eyes move although the lids are closed and our other muscles are relaxed. (This muscle relaxation tends to account for one of the common dreams everybody has—the dream in which somebody or something chases or bears down 4 on you and you feel unable to move, according to Dr. Neal Ely, University of Washington clinical professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. ) Watch for this rapid eye movement (REM)in people sleeping. If you wake them up during the REM phase,they'll have a dream to tell you. If you wake them up during anon-rapid-eye-movement phase, they will probably remember onlysomething vague or nothing at all.Everyone has some idea of the nature of his dreams, but what are the dreams of others like? Two medical studies done in the United States by Drs. Calvin Hall and Fred Snyder proved that most people's dreams are not very exciting, the majority of the dreams reported were of a familiar nature to the dreamer and quite reasonable.Dreams are not lonesome places, the studies show. In 95 percent of the dreams analyzed by Hall, another person besides the dreamer was present. Also, the majority of dreams included unpleasant emotions.The question of what causes us to dream still has scientists scratching their heads. Dr. Ely felt that we may have dreams because we have needs that are unmet in our daily lives. British psychologist Ann Faraday, in her book Dream Power, sets forth 5 a different reason. "REM" sleep is important for brain growth and renewal, she says, citing studies that show that unborn babies in one month or two before birth may spend up to 80 percent of their total sleep in REM sleep. (It is just before birth that the brain grows most rapidly. ) Senile people and mentally defective people have little REM sleep, other studies show. （http://www.itscopied.com/）