DREAMCATCHER
Considered to be a talisman to ensure restful sleep and productive dreaming, the dreamcatcher is a North American device hung above the bed to dispel nightmares and retain the essence of good dreams.
Use of the dreamcatcher by Native American cultures is based on an old Lakota folktale about a spiritual leader to whom the god Iktomi, the great teacher of wisdom, appeared in the form of a spider. As he gave advice about the cycles of life, the importance of working with nature and of taking good advice when it was offered, rejecting bad advice, Iktomi began to spin a web. When the web was completed it had a hole in the centre. Iktomi gave it to the elder saying: ‘Use the web to help yourself and your people to reach your goals and make good use of people’s ideas, dreams and visions. If you believe in the great spirit, the web will catch your great ideas, and the bad ones will go through the hole.’
DREAMS
Everyone dreams. It is estimated that in an average lifetime a person will spend approximately 25 years asleep and experience at least 300,000 dreams, regardless of whether these dreams are recalled on awakening. Researchers believe that babies dream the most, children dream for four or five hours a night and adults for one or two hours. Animals also appear to dream.
Research from the University of Chicago has shown that dreams occur during the rapid eye movement (REM) period of sleep, which occurs for between five and forty minutes every sixty to ninety minutes of sleep. Most people only remember the last dream prior to waking but if they are woken up during earlier dream periods they will recall other dreams.
Unless written down immediately on waking most dreams fade within a few minutes. Dreams usually occur in colour but seldom have smells or taste, and this may be due to the fact that only visual brain neurons fire during REM. Almost all dreams use metaphors to deal with issues in the life of the dreamer, and every event in the dream is believed to have some kind of significance for the person dreaming it.
A brief history of dreams
People have always been fascinated by dreams and what they mean. All primitive religions viewed dreams as ways for the spirits or deities to speak to humans. The earliest known dream dictionary dates back around 4,000 years. Now called the Chester Beatty Papyrus it came from Thebes in Upper Egypt and is kept in the British Museum. In the Chester Beatty Papyrus dreams are interpreted and translated as omens or prophecies. For example, dreaming that your teeth fall out is interpreted as a loved one trying to kill you.
In ancient Greece dreams were also thought to be unlucky or lucky predictions. Around AD 200, Artemidorus, a dream interpreter who lived in Asia Minor, wrote a book about dream interpretation that suggested that dreams were continuations of the dreamer’s day. The Old Testament makes countless references to dream interpretation.
The importance of dreams and their meanings were prominent in the writings of the Early Church Fathers, including St Augustine, up until the time of St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) who regarded dreams as insignificant; for several hundred years afterwards, dreams were no longer considered important. Even Shakespeare called them ‘children of the idle brain’. Although dream interpretation did continue to be an important part of the service of magicians and astrologers, this dreams-should-be-ignored school of thought persisted until the nineteenth century. Then along came psychiatrists Sig-mund Freud and Carl Jung, the two men who have had the greatest impact on the way we look at dreams today.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) opened the door to the scientific study of dreams with his book The Interpretation of Dreams; he considered dreams to be the ‘royal road to the unconscious’ and believed them to be wish fulfilment of repressed sexual desires from childhood. To interpret dreams Freud used a method called free association in which the dreamer says whatever comes to mind in relation to events in the dream.
Freud’s work paved the way for the work of Carl Jung (1875-1961). Jung considered dreams to be expressions of the contents of the collective unconscious, a source of shared knowledge that exists within us all. Jung believed the purpose of dreams was to offer guidance and information about the self. They were the language of the unconscious and they could tell us about the state of our inner lives; to ignore dreams was to court disaster. Even though dream symbols from the collective unconscious have universal or archetypal meanings, according to Jung, only the dreamer could interpret the dream’s true meaning, not an outsider.
There have been other theories since Freud and Jung but for the most part dreams are regarded as tools for change, growth and wellbeing. No one knows how, but dreams seem to be able to link the conscious (waking) mind with the hidden part of the mind called the unconscious or intuition and by so doing they provide a rich and powerful inner resource that can enhance life considerably. Today dream interpretation is extremely popular, with people from all walks of life using dreams as unique and very personal sources of comfort, guidance and inspiration.
Dreams, health and creativity
Scientists tell us that dreaming is essential to our mental, emotional and physical health and wellbeing, because dreams can help us relax, release frustrations, sort out information, solve problems or alert us to them, play out fantasies, offer inspiration and restore balance.
There are numerous famous examples of dreams offering inspiration. Solutions to problems, ideas for inventions and artistic endeavours have all found their way to the conscious mind via dreams. Mary Shelley dreamed of the creature that was to become Frankenstein. Other famous literary dreamers include Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë, Robert Louis Stevenson and J R R Tolkien. Paul McCartney heard a haunting melody in one of his dreams and wrote it down. It became the song ‘Yesterday’. Inventions and ideas that have sprung from dreams include the model of the atom, the M9 analogue computer, the isolation of insulin in the treatment of diabetes and the sewing machine.
Dreams and the paranormal
Dreams of the dead are viewed in the West from a psychological perspective and not as actual encounters with ghosts, but many believe that the dead appear in dreams because they have a purpose: usually to offer advice and instruction, as happened in the Chaffin Will case. Some dreams involving the dead are also thought to be death omens. In the eighteenth century Lord Lyttelton dreamt of a fluttering bird and a woman in white who told him he would die in three days’ time. Despite his best efforts to prove her wrong, Lyttleton died as predicted.
Although dreams that focus on communication between the living and the dead have been accepted in many cultures since ancient times as proof that the dead have the ability to interfere with the lives of the living, dreams have also always shared a strong link with supernatural powers, in particular with precognition and telepathy.
Although rare, precognitive dreams are ones in which you see the future before it happens. The ancient Chaldeans, Chinese, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Native Americans all believed dreams were a method of foretelling the future, and even today there are instances when people claim to have dreamt of things before they happen. Many people, for example, claim to have had dreams of the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster before it happened. There are also stories of people who cancel trips or flights because of a foreboding dream or people who dreamt the winning lottery numbers.
There is strong evidence that some precognitive dreams warn about future health problems. Jung noticed that if his patients dreamt of injury to a horse - the archetypal symbol of animal life within the human body - they were often in the early stages of serious illness. A 1987 study at Michigan State University showed that cardiac patients who dreamt of destruction were far more likely to have worse heart disease than those who did not. Dreams also serve as a preparation for death,