Because learning about your brain and sleep can be fun . . .
The questions in the headline aren’t easy to answer. There are a lot of different opinions and only a few points of consensus. Here’s one definition: Dreams are a phenomena that happens primarily when sleeping, whether remembered or not. They’re a type of brain activity that results in communication between the subconscious mind and the…
One can classify phenomena in a variety of different ways. Dreams are no exception. They’re a communication between the subconscious and conscious mind. Communications contain information. You can, therefore, classify them based on the type of information they contain, at least for the person who develops the ability and skill of remembering and interpreting their…
Understanding yourself better using your dream journal (Part 6/7) Blue Opossum (a pseudonym) is a K-12 educator from Australia. He has an incredibly detailed recall of his dreams and a heightened awareness of the different stages of sleep. He’s got a real gift. Born in 1960, his dream journal, for practical purposes, starts in 1963…
Plenty of people have had psychic experiences. These experiences transcend every culture, every country, every time period. Why are you worried about talking about your psychic experience then? Everyone has their own reason, but a common one is you don’t want to sound crazy. You don’t want people to doubt your mental health. Some psychic…
As recounted in the post on keeping a dream journal, one of the most famous dreams of all time was Elias Howe’s 1845 dream leading to the sewing machine’s invention. It was a dream that revolutionized an industry and changed the world. It has been called racist. For weeks, the young man had been working…
Life might be nicer if everything was fair all the time. If it were, however, life wouldn’t be a challenge. We’d all probably end up bored. If everything for everyone was fair, we wouldn’t ever need to feel guilty. We wouldn’t have more than someone else. We wouldn’t have less. We wouldn’t have to think…
In Charles Dickens’s The Christmas Carol, the old, miserly protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge confronts his nightmares and emerges a better man. Dickens describes him as greedy, ill-tempered, and grasping. Scrooge, at least, is good in that he becomes a better person by the end of the story. Dream journalers sometimes have nightmares so unsettling they don’t…
When you call someone a “dreamer,” it’s something of an insult. Yet, when you call someone a “visionary,” that’s high praise. Why? What’s the difference? There’s not that much beyond the way the word sounds, the connotation it carries. To many people’s way of thinking, dreaming connotes pie-in-the-sky fancies. Impractical ideas. Something that doesn’t work…
Not every dream is symbolic of something, though many are. People tend to ignore dreams without symbols unless they’re an instance of deja vu where one has the feeling they’ve been somewhere or done something before. Dream journalers tend to talk about dreams with symbols more often. They’re more interesting because we learn from those dreams. They…
One can have all kinds of sex dreams. In your dreams, you might have sex with people you wouldn’t consider in real life. Multiple partners may show up. The dreams could feature people of the same sex, homeless people, powerful people, strangers, children, machines, objects, anyone, and anything. In dreams, after all, anything is possible.…