Price - Dreams: Interpreting Your Dreams and How to Dream Your Desires: Lucid Dreaming, Visions and Dream Interpretation

Table of Contents

Introduction

When it comes to lifes mysteries, there are many unansweredquestions that continue to intrigue people to this very day. One suchmysterious concept is that of Dreams. Where do they come from? How do weexperience them? Can we make them happen at will?

Since time immemorial, people have experienced the phenomenon ofvirtual reality in the form of dreams. Right from the elite to common man andfrom children to adults, everyone has witnessed vivid dreams, while asleep, andwondered as to what exactly happens to their minds when they shut their eyes.However, its more complex than that. In order to reach that stage of dreaming,you need to get into REM sleep as thats when dreams start to happen.

The trend has existed from the time of our ancestors, theNeanderthals and the Paleoliths , walked on Earth andthe trend of dream interpretation continues to be a part of our living dayphenomenon.

We spend many waking hours wondering about our dreams and wishingto find answers to the many questions that pop in our heads when it comes todreams. What really are these dreams and why do we experience them? Do all ofus dream the same dream or do we have different dreams? Is there a cause andeffect at play or is it all just random? Is the meaning of dreams opposite toreality? Well, there is only one way to find the answer to these questions:read on because this book explores the phenomena of dreams.

This book will not only explore the meaning of dreams, but willdelve into the depths to understand why human beings experience dreams, and howthey can be interpreted. We will also look at theories of dreams that manypsychologists have presented over the years and try to analyze the concept of adream in detail.

I thank you for choosing this book and hope you have a good timereading it because the subject of dreams is so interesting. It affects everyonein the world so is something that will be viewed from many viewpoints. Thatmeans that your dreams may have a special meaning to you, although the samedreams dreamed by someone else may have a completely different interpretation.Thats why the subject is so fascinating and gives rise to such speculation.

Chapter 1

Whatare Dreams?

All that we see orseem is but a dream within a dream. Edgar Allan Poe

When it comes to defining a set concept, most people often seem tostruggle with it, as there will be a million possible ways to describe it.However, the best thing is to understand an acceptable definition and then formour individual opinions. So, to make it easy for ourselves, let us first lookat the dictionary meaning of a dream and then go about dissecting the concept.

The dictionarystates that a dream is- a series ofthoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person's mind during sleep.

Here, a dream is described as an occurrence where a personexperiences the following aspects.

Thoughts- Thoughts are ideals that people have. People generallyformulate opinions in their minds and thoughts are a result of the same.

Images- these are visuals of objects and people around us. Everyday, we get to see just so many things that it is obvious for them to reappearin our dreams.

Sensations- The human body is quite sensitive to stimuli. It willfeel sensations even when asleep and will also react to it, regardless of beingawake or asleep.

All these occur within a persons mind, when they are asleep. Inorder to reach the true dream state, we need to be in REM sleep which is a deepform of sleep where the subconscious mind is able to explore and thats wheredreams become interesting, because they are not made from conscious thoughts orbrought about by choice. However, this is not the only dream state that existsas you will see later in this chapter.

This pretty much sums up the concept of a dream, described within afew wise words and tells a person what a dream is all about. But given how deepa concept it really is, it is rather unacceptable to remain satisfied with sucha minimal explanation.

If it really is just a sequence of images and sounds that getrepeated in our minds, then why do we spend countless hours wondering what ourdreams mean? Surely there must be more to it than just a reiteration ofdifferent everyday situations.

It is interesting to know that there are two distinct approaches tounderstanding and interpreting dreams. On the one hand there is the neuroscientific analysis of dreams and on the other, there is the psychoanalyticalinterpretation.

The former will be interested in knowing about the basic structureof a dream and how dreams take shape. They will conduct experiments to knowwhat happens in the mind while dreaming, and the physical signs and symptomsthat the person shows while he or she is dreaming.

The psychoanalysts, on the other hand, are more bothered about theinterpretation of the dreams that people have. They perform experiments to finda co-relation between peoples dreams and their lives.

Upon mixing the two, scientists were able to come up with twodistinct results. The first set found that all people have a particular dreamphase, which occurs in succession through the night and the latter found a fewcommon dreams that most people have on most nights. We will look at the former,i.e. phases of dreams in this chapter and look at the latter, i.e. commondreams in a later chapter of this book.

Dream phases

Everybody dreams, and there is no person on earth who has notdreamt a vivid dream in their life. In fact, not just humans, animals too dreamand experience similar virtual phenomenon.