What is good?: Activity: Dreaming

Why I think dreaming is good:

- It's an interesting and mysterious thing

- Trying to find the difference between reality and dream can be hard!

- Some dreams can be amazing

- Dreams can open your eyes to things you need to change

- If you get your dreams studied, a professional can tell you more about yourself

- You can say and act in all sorts of ways in bed when dreaming

- Dreams can make you sleep walk

- Dreaming means your in a deep sleep, and will wake up fully rested.

- Dreams can come in a range of form, whether that be pleasant or nightmares

- The best dreams you forget

- Dreaming can make you forget everything, make things magical

- Day dreaming is pleasant, but looks rather strange to onlooker...staring into space is odd.

.....

Facts about dreaming:

-Dreams are successions of images, ideas, emotions and sensations occurring involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep.

- The scientific study of dreams is known as oneirology

- Scientists believe that everyone dreams, but people will tend to forget them when they naturally pass out of sleep through the traditional sleep cycle

- If a person is awoken during REM sleep, they are much more likely to remember the dream.

- Dreams mainly occur in the R.E.M. stage (rapid-eye movement) of sleep, that is when brain activity is high and signalled by continuous movements of the eyes

- Dreams are a connection to the human subconscious. They can range from normal and ordinary to overly surreal and bizarre

- Dreams can often at times make a creative thought to the person or give a sense of inspiration

- Dream interpretations date back to 5000-4000 B.C., where they were documented on clay tablets. The earliest recorded dreams were acquired from materials dating back approximately 5000 years, in Mesopotamia

- In some of the earliest societies, people were unable to tell the difference between the dream world and the waking world. They just simply chose not to make the distinction because they believed that the dream world was an extension of reality, though a more powerful world.

- The most common emotion experienced in dreams is anxiety. Other emotions include abandonment, anger, fear, joy, happiness, etc. Negative emotions are much more common than positive ones.

- A small minority of people say that they dream only in black and white.

- A daydream is a visionary fantasy, especially one of happy, pleasant thoughts, hopes or ambitions, imagined as coming to pass, and experienced while awake.

.....

Words relating to dreaming:

- Daydream

- Magical

- Reality

- Nightmare

- Sleeping

- Sleep walking

- Mysterious

- Emotional

- Forgetful

- R.E.M

- Oneirology

- Thoughts

- Distinction

.....

Opinions about dreaming:

Questions and answers posted on Yahoo Answers

" What causes some people to dream in black and white?"

" Hello, I have found a very interesting article, it may answer your question:

It's quite a commonly-held belief that we dream in black and white! It's not true, of course. You can see this by the fact that at least every now-and-then you can remember a dream in which there was some colour.

So why is it believed that we dream in black and white? I know why, and I'll try to explain it, but it's not an easy thing to explain as there are extra concepts required.

The first thing is that YES it's true there are dreams in which there is no colour, but that is not because they're in black and white!

What happens is that in dreaming, the automatic checking systems that go on in the mind are turned off. So, if the queen of England visited and brought a few aliens round for tea you'd probably be working out if you'd got enough cups and whether the biscuits you'd got would be acceptable, rather than thinking that it was a bit odd to be visited by the queen and some aliens.

Also, in dreams, things which aren't relevant are just UNSPECIFIED, and there are no alarm bells to flag up that something is MISSING. So, when you're flying on a magic carpet, you can't necessarily say which shoes you might have been wearing.

But not being able to tell what shoes you had on does not imply you were barefoot. This is what happens with the COLOUR situation. In a dream, where the colour of something is relevant, you see colour, but where the colour is not relevant, there is NO COLOUR INFORMATION. But that doesn't mean it's in black&white.

Black and white is a function of televisions when the colour information is removed, but the same is not true of the mind. Take a look at a few examples, grass for example might not be green in a dream, but it's not grey like in a black and white movie. It's just not relevant what colour it is. Most people's hair colour is not grey in a dream, but just "average coloured". If you saw Zyra in a dream, you'd probably see a vivid hair colour but not necessarily be able to tell what colour it was!

It is this, the fact that "missing" information is not noticed to be missing, that fools the conscious mind on waking up into concluding that therefore by implication the dream must have been in black and white, whereas in fact it was just that colour wasn't important in that particular dream.

Plus, if anyone actually still believes that in dreams there is never any colour because the experts always say "we dream in black and white", just stop believing the experts! You'll soon wake up and find you have dreamt something which had some vivid colour!"

" What are lucid dreams and do they make your dream come true?"

" Yes, a lot of people have used lucid dreaming to control their dreams. Most people have experienced a lucid dream when they suddenly become aware that they're dreaming. Usually, they wake up when this happens.

The goal of lucid dreaming is to train yourself to recognize that you're dreaming so that you'll be able to make your dreams into whatever you want them to be, without waking up. Some people use lucid dreaming to live happier lives and to take advantage of the creative subconscious that takes over in a dream state, to solve their problems.

But you'll need dedication and practice to get lucid dreaming to work for you. One method is to have a dream journal, which is a journal you write in daily (or whenever you dream). Write whatever you remember of your dreams when you wake up, even if it's fragmented or short.

You will begin to notice things about your dreams in your journal. These "things" are occurrences which can't happen in real life, and they're called called signs. An example is, you might dream that you're in your house and suddenly your dog starts hovering above you. Your sign for this dream is that your dog was flying.

Over time, you'll be exposed to these signs in your dream journal, and will begin to recognize that you're dreaming when a similar sign shows up during your dream. It might take you weeks to develop the first lucid dreams, so it takes a lot of patience and devotion.

There are other techniques but the dream journal is the most common and one of the most effective I know."

.....

Images of dreaming, a difficult one to achieve due to dreams and images of dreaming being someones thoughts rather than a physical thing. Here are some interpretations of dreams and dreaming.