dreamer’s feelings of freedom, glory, and success, that make him fly over cities
and hover around above all people. The last article interprets the common dream
of being unprepared for an exam, which my mother often gets. They say that the
people that get this dream were usually never unprepared for exams in real life,
but they tend to evaluate themselves very harshly in their daily lives and who
face up to challenging situations. When I think about this it makes sense, at
least where my mother is concerned.
In conclusion, I think that in spite of all the scientific material
available on the process of dreaming, it is far from being unraveled. Such an
attempt was made as early as 350 B.C. by Aristotle. He stated that ?the dream is
a sort of presentation which occurs in sleep? and that ?not every presentation
which occurs in sleep necessarily a dream. For in the first place. some persons
when asleep actually, in a certain way, perceive sounds, light, savour, and
contact; feebly, however, remotely. Nor should the true thoughts, as distinct
from the mere presentations, which occur in sleep be called dreams. The dream
proper is a presentation based on the movement of sense impressions, when such
presentation occurs during sleep? (Aristotle ?On Dreams’ ).This ingenious paper
by Aristotle managed to define dreams and to distinguish the thoughtlike dreams
that we encounter during NREM sleep from the real dreams that we experience in
REM sleep.
Nevertheless, even more than 2,000 years after this paper, our
information about dreams is still very limited when compared to other areas that
human beings achieved great success in, such as science and technology. The main
problem is the great diversity of the issue and the difficulty of conducting
physical experiments and analysis on such a phenomenon. It is a phenomenon that
defies the laws of physics and society, and the limits of dreams are stretched
as far as the human imagination goes. The best we can do is to give limited
explanations that we think might work with us, but the true secrets of dreaming
will never be uncovered. We can just share our dreams and try to understand some
events that happen to dreamers all around the world, which makes us appreciate
dreams more and more.
Works Cited
Abdel Hamid, Ranya, 22 yrs., Mechanical Engineering major at AUC.
Aristotle, ?On Dreams?, 350 B.C.
Atkinson, Rita L., ?Introduction To Psychology?, 1993.
Dreams Interpretation Services & Resources, ?http://www1.rider.edu/~
~suler/dreams.html?, 1996.
Farrag, Mariam, 20 yrs., Political Science major at AUC.
Ghaleb, Teymour, 23 yrs., Marketing Analyst at Daewoo Co.
Hassan, Farouk, Dr., Practicing Psychiatrist.
Rafik, Nadine, 17 yrs., student at DSB.
Shawky, Safinaz, 21 yrs., Economics major at Cairo University.
34b