Dreams Life
Dreams LifeDream Life
One of the brain's most astonishing capacities is its ability to create its own images-dreams-without any visual input from the outside world. Whether your sleeping or awake, your brain is constantly at work,communicating messages to you in the form of dreams. Dreams are a communication of body, mind and spirit in a symbolic communicative environmental state of being (Central 103). We dream in order to sort out memories, either adding them to the memory store or thrwoing away unwanted information. It has also been suggested that dreams are an attempt by the brain to make sense of stray thoughts. Essentially, dreams are our method of relaxing and letting our minds drift away into a different world. Your brain, mind and spirit, while at rest "review" and analysis in its own way long term, short term and spirit memory. It kicks around emotions, thoughts, ideas, actions and interactions of the short term memory. All this data as well as your subconcious of what people do and tell you, are all processed as a dream (Central 104). One study of dreaming strongly suggests that it is a primary means by which we form and evaluate our survival strategies. Other sleep studies have shown that dreams and dreaming are essential to our mental health ( Howell 105). Together these sudies emphasize the psychological importance of dreams and dreaming. They show how our consciousness maintains its delicate balance. Ken Howell suggests why consciousness is like a scale balancing one side against another and how dreaming is related : On one side of this mental scale our consciousness weighs its conscious experiences. On the opposite side of our mental scale our consciousness weighs its subconscious experiences. When we give more weight or attention to either side of this mental scale, our consciousness becomes unbalanced. Essentially this is why you dream. Sleeping gives our body a chance to regain its strength. Dreaming gives our consciousness a chance to restore its balance (105). Through dreams our consciousness restores its balances by weighting the subliminal influences affecting our life. Dreams are a subliminal language. They are the language of your subconscious mind (Howell 105). The Bible as well as other great books of historical and revealed religion, shows traces of a general and substantial belief in dreams ( Miller vii). In ancient times, it was thought that dreams were messages from the gods or from demons (Moffett 5). Priests were the only people skilled enough to interpret these dreams. People would travel far distances to visit a temple to get a reading of their dreams (Moffett 5). In many other cultures people believed dreams were presented by an outside force and intended to serve as oracles or omens (Lemley 2). A little later on Greek philosophers furthur bettered dream analysis. The most famous of these Greek philosophers was Aristotle. He spoke of the illusion of 'sense-perception', the malfunctioning of these senses which allows dreams to occur. Aristotle later suggested that dreams are...
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