Dreams And Future Predictions
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imilarly, in modern times, Dr. Gillian Holloway says that seeing snapshots of the future is almost inevitable for people who make a habit of recording and studying dreams, and that they could broaden your perception of how dreams can assist you (Holloway, Yes 2). She tells a story of a student who told her she dreamed of driving down a darkened road when a horse dashed out in front of her car. Startled, she awakened just before she could react to the situation. A few months later, while driving to pick up her daughter from a visit with friends, something about the darkened country road she traveled struck her familiar. A nearby horse pasture reminded her of the dream she d had. Thoughtfully she slowed the car, and noticed the fence to the pasture was down. Just then a horse bolted from the shoulder right into the road. Had she not remembered the dream, she might indeed have hit the horse. Thanks to the eerie feeling of familiarity she had slowed down enough so that a collision was averted (Holloway, Yes 1).
Freud s View
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t the beginning of this century Freud tried to revive the old idea, but with a new twist. He said the dream hides not a divine message but a wish from the dreamer s unconscious. A dream is formed when the unconscious wish seeks release in the dreamer s conscious mind (Boxer 1). According to Freud, his interpretation of Alexander s dream would be not a tricky way for the gods to tell Alexander he would conquer Tyre, but an elliptical expression of Alexander s wish to conquer Tyre. Alexander s successful siege was not the fulfillment of divine prophecy but simply a wish come true (Boxer 1).
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igmund Freud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious (Morris 155). Believing that dreams represent wishes that have not been fulfilled in reality, he asserted that people’s dreams reflect the motives guiding their behavior Xmotives of which they may not be consciously aware. Freud distinguished the content of dreams from their latent Xthe hidden, unconscious thoughts or desires that he believed were expressed indirectly through dreams. In dreams, according to Freud, people permit themselves to express primitive desires that are relatively free of moral controls (Morris 156). For example, someone who is not consciously aware of hostile feelings toward a sister may dream about murdering her. However, even in a dream, such hostile feelings may be censored and transformed into a highly symbolic form. For instance, the desire to do away with one s sister may be recast into the dream image of seeing her off at a train terminal. This process of censorship and symbolic transformation accounts for the highly illogical nature of many dreams (Morris 156).
Neurophysiologist s View
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europhysiologists offer quite a different explanation for the illogical, disjointed nature of so many dreams. Allan Hobson, M.D. and Robert W. McCarley, M.D., Harvard University Medical School proposes that dreams are generated by random outbursts of nerve-cell brain activity. In responding to these internal stimuli Xmany of which involve brain cells used in vision and hearing Xthe brain attempts to make sense of them by drawing on memory to create the images and scenes we experience as dreams (Morris 156). Hobson disagrees with Freud by stating that; A dream does not begin with an unconscious wish rising from the unconscious. Rather, it begins when the brain stem sends some meaningless signal to the cerebral cortex. He goes on to say, If a dream is meaningful at all, it is transparently meaningful. If some of it looks like gibberish, it probably is. You can try to interpret it if you want to, but why would you want to when there is so much information that is clearly meaningful? (Boxer 2).
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ome researchers suggest that the bizarre content of dreams reflect the brain s effort to free itself of irrelevant, repetitious thoughts or associations during sleep so that it will be more open to new information during waking consciousness (Crick & Mitchison 111-114). Yet, the opposing view to that is that in dreams we reprocess information, gathered during the day, as a way of strengthening the memory of information that is crucial to our survival (Morris 156). How does this work? At the neurophysiological level, REM may be related to brain restoration and growth (Oswald 1973), and researchers have indeed confirmed that protein synthesis proceeds at a faster rate during REM sleep than NREM sleep. Other research has demonstrated not only that both human and nonhuman subjects spend more time in REM sleep after learning difficult material but also that interfering with REM sleep in the days immediately after subjects initially learn something severely disrupts their memory for the newly learned material (Morris 157).
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reams can have an effect on our waking mood too according to Rosalind Cartwright, Ph.D., director of the Sleep Research Center at Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke s Medical Center in Chicago. Her research finds that dreams allow our brains to repair our moods X the brain goes to work right away on negative dream material at the beginning of the night so the bad mood has dissipated by the end of the night (Dreaming). Subjects who were generally not depressed but went to bed in a bad mood reported feeling much better after a good night s sleep. I can definitely relate to this from my own experience. I always feel better after a good night s sleep.
Learning From Your Dreams
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reams can also be helpful, extremely informative and important to decipher, especially recurring dreams, according to Gillian Holloway, Ph.D. Your subconscious mind has gone to a great deal of trouble to send the same dream telegram several times, and it will generally continue to do so until you recognize the insight being offered, or outgrow the issue being addressed. Often these dreams recur for a discrete period of time, such as during childhood, adolescence, college years, or during a specific relationship or period of employment. If you outgrow or move away from a certain lifestyle you may stop having the recurring dream, unless something in your current situation strikes a similar emotional chord from your past; then the dream may resurface, like an emotional home movie of certain feeling and moods (Holloway, Recurring 1).
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n many recurring dreams we are attempting to resolve a problem; these attempts may help slightly, be laughably ineffectual, or make matters worse. These attempted solutions often reflect the manner in which we are trying to go about matters in waking life. It is important to identify the part of your life that is being reviewed in the dreams, but it is also important to examine the way you respond during the dream action. You may notice that you are waiting in a line where you will never be served, or that you are zealously trying to chop wood with a butter knife. Recurring dreams shed light on things we re missing while we are awake; sometimes we can see we are barking up the wrong tree, and other times we are given clues toward a more workable solution (Holloway,Recurring.1)
Conclusion
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egardless of which viewpoint or interpretation that you may believe the only person that you can really trust is your own feeling on the matter. Take a look at what is going on in your life at the present time, or you may even have to take a look in the past, because sometimes your mind may play tricks on you. There may be hidden secrets that are planted in your mind that you are trying to forget, possibly with a little dream interpretation you may be able to free your mind of any untold stories.
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