Patricia Garfield - The Dream Book: A Young Persons Guide to Understanding Dreams

W hen you compare your dreams to what happens while youre awake, your daytime life might seem pretty boring. Have you ever had any of these dreams:

• that you were flying on a dragons back

• that you were being chased by a vampire

• that you were eating a hot fudge sundae

• that you were being kissed by your favorite movie star

• that your teeth were falling apart

• that you were riding in a car with no brakes

• that you were hunting for the room where you were going to take a test

• that you were falling through black space

• that you were soaring to the moon

• that you were running naked down the school hallway

• that you were wearing a totally cool outfit

• that you were nearly drowned by a tidal wave

• that you were trapped in your body

• that you found an extra room in your house

• that you were talking with someone who is dead?

If you have, then youre not alone. All these have been dreamed by kids a lot like you. Welcome to the wild, weird, and wonderful world of dreams!

Your dreams are changing, big time. Those hormones you hear so much about not only cause guys to get beards and girls to get curvier bodies, but they can also create chaos in your dream life. Researchers tell us that the quality of dreams changes as adolescence begins. Nice dreams decrease. Wild and wacky dreams increase. If you start having some crazy dream adventures, you should know that so does almost every other kid your age.

During the years you are doing the most growing, you are also dreaming more. The more you sleep, the more you dream. Soon, youll want to sleep more than you used to you might have already noticed that you get drowsy more often. The same hormones that cause the radical changes in your body during adolescence also make you feel more sleepy than at any other time in your adult life (except during pregnancy for women).

We spend about one-third of our entire lives in sleep. We need more sleep during times of stress. Sleep is one of our basic needs.

You need to sleep, just as you need to eat and drink, to survive. Scientists are not really sure why, but they have found that people who are kept awake for several days usually become irritable, inattentive, and irrational. (Kids are often accused of not being able to keep their temper, pay attention, or think straight maybe you can blame it on sleep deprivation!) Animals deprived of sleep for a long time grow thin and die.

Some researchers think that sleep restores something in the body that gets used up while we are awake; others think sleep removes toxins that have built up in the body as we get tired. We know that a certain growth hormone is only released into our bodies during the deepest stages of sleep. This hormone helps kids develop normally, and also helps to repair tissues and heal wounds.

Our brain waves change during sleep. They shift from the fast irregular rhythm (called beta waves) of wakefulness to a slower regular rhythm (called alpha waves) as the body relaxes. Sleep actually begins when the brain sends out bursts of sleep spindles. When you feel so drowsy you cant hold your eyes open and you begin to nod off while reading or watching TV, your brain is producing sleep spindles. You may notice wisps of dreams as you drift, or suddenly startle awake before falling asleep again. The brain waves get even slower (delta waves) as we enter deep sleep. The slowest waves our brains produce (theta waves) may appear next. Your soundest sleep is often during the first hour or so of the night.

Then, about ninety minutes into the sleep period, your eyes start to dart back and forth under your closed lids in rapid eye movement, or REM. Thats the dream state, not the band! This brain pattern resembles the waking waves of an active mind, but it differs because your body remains deeply relaxed. It seems like the large muscles in your legs and arms are paralyzed, while the small muscles in your face and fingers may twitch.

When you close your eyes to the outer world in sleep, you open your mind to an inner world of dreams. Dreams are a kind of thinking that takes place during sleep. This thinking is mostly in images, like a language of pictures.

Dreaming is one of your bodys basic rhythms. Throughout day and night your body temperature varies, reaching peaks of highs and valleys of lows. Your food is digested and your heart pumps your blood in patterns that increase and decrease. During waking hours, you daydream in a cycle that lasts about ninety minutes. While you sleep, you dream in the same ninety-minute rhythm. In the low period of sleep, you have thought like dreams that are not as vivid or active as the mountain peaks of your REM dreams.

With each cycle of dreaming, you dream for a longer time. At the beginning of the night, a dream lasts only ten minutes or so. By the end of the night, you are spending 30 to 45 minutes, even an hour, in a dream. As your dream periods grow longer, your deep sleep periods get shorter. Most adults dream 20 to 25 percent of the time they are asleep. You will go through four or five REM cycles during a typical night. If you sleep eight hours, youll dream two full hours of that time.

People have always been fascinated with dreams. Since the first written record was scratched into clay tablets in the days of the ancient Sumerian people, dreams have been part of humankinds history. If you know the Old Testament of the Bible, you might remember Josephs interpretation of Pharaohs dream of the seven fat and seven lean cattle, and Jacobs dream of the ladder reaching to heaven. The mother of the Buddha, the prophet Mohammed, and the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, are among the people who have had important dreams recorded in holy books. Each religion has inscribed the dreams of their founders and chief followers, finding inspiration, warnings of danger, and guidance in them. Dreams were believed to be messages from the gods and still are in some cultures.

All people have been fascinated with the mystery of dreams. Most cultures have developed ways to protect sleeping people from the evil spirits thought to bring bad dreams, and to insure good dreams. Some Aboriginal people of North America used to hang dreamcatchers above the cradleboards of sleeping infants to screen out nightmares and allow the passage of good dreams. Chinese parents provided their children with double-headed tiger pillows to scare off evil spirits who might approach from any direction. Japanese people carried amulets carved from ivory in the shape of a mythological creature called a Baku, who was supposed to eat bad dreams. Europeans hung a stone with a natural hole on a red ribbon and tied it to a bedpost to protect the sleeper.