Not to, er, sound a note of alarm or anything, but you’ll notice roosters are nowhere to be found on this list. That’s because roosters will (and do) ‘cock a doodle doo all night long, if they’re awake. Trust me. I know this to be true after spending a long, sleepless night at a small inn on a small Greek island in the middle of a brutally cold winter.
I recently came across this series of Forensic Pillow designs and couldn’t help thinking they are not the most relaxing things out there.
Imagine walking in on someone sleeping under this:
Marie Raymond sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night, heart pounding, freaked out by the sound of her name being shouted loud and clear. Other times she’ll be awakened by the sound of a huge crash, as if someone has broken a window or knocked over a set of dishes.
“The sound is terrifying — super loud, like someone has broken in,” says Raymond, a 38-year-old arts administrator from Seattle. “But when I get up to look around, nothing’s amiss and everything’s quiet.” After dealing with it off and on for the last several months, Raymond believes she may have exploding head syndrome. She hasn’t seen a doctor about it, but has done some research online.
Dreaming is one of the most mysterious and interesting experiences in our lives.
During the Roman Era, some dreams were even submitted to the Roman Senate for analysis and dream interpretation. They were thought to be messages from the gods. Dream interpreters even accompanied military leaders into battles and campaigns!
In addition to this, it is also known, that many artists have received their creative ideas from their dreams.
It has been a big month for dreams in the news, with the New York Times and the New Yorker both weighing in on the subject. First up, the Times reports on a new theory advanced by Dr. Allan Hobson, who says that dreaming exists as a "warm-up" state for waking.
According to Dr. Hobson, dreaming is "a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking." But during sleep, dreaming comes to the forefront of the brain's activity, exercising it and "tuning the mind for conscious awareness."
Hobson has long been controversial for his insistence that dreams are the result of physiological process and have no inherent meaning. His new theory draws in part on studies of the brain activity of lucid dreamers--people who are aware that they are dreaming while still in the dream.
Brain wave patterns during lucid dreaming show a typical REM sleep pattern associated with dreaming, mixed in with patterns associated with waking awareness. The discovery of these "mixed states" give validity to the notion that we can hold two (or more?) different states of awareness simultaneously, and should give rise to some interesting research on altered states of consciousness.
Margaret Talbot also has a great recent article on nightmares in the New Yorker. The article focuses on imagery-rehearsal therapy, a technique where nightmare sufferers imagine how they would re-script a frightening dream, then "rehearse" it several times during the day and just before going to sleep at night.
Imagery-rehearsal therapy is surprisingly successful in many instances. Talbot speaks to a wide range of experts on dreams and nightmares, and the article gives a thorough, well-rounded picture of current thinking on why we have nightmares, and what to do about them.
These are exciting times to be a dream researcher, and an active dreamer! For nightmare sufferers, there have never been so many good options for coping with bad dreams. And for those of us who have occasional nightmares but aren't debilitated by them, we can extend our understanding of why these dreams come to us and what wisdom they might hold, like never before.
-SOURCE OF ORIGINAL ARTICLE-
Dreams are so rich and have such an authentic feeling that scientists have long assumed they must have a crucial psychological purpose. To Freud, dreaming provided a playground for the unconscious mind; to Jung, it was a stage where the psyche’s archetypes acted out primal themes. Newer theories hold that dreams help the brain to consolidate emotional memories or to work though current problems, like divorce and work frustrations.
Yet what if the primary purpose of dreaming isn’t psychological at all?
According to Dr J. Allan Hobson, the major function of the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep associated with dreams is physiological rather than psychological. During REM sleep the brain is activated and "warming its circuits" and is anticipating the sights, sounds and emotions of the waking state.
Dr Hobson said the idea explains a lot, and likened it to jogging. The body does not remember every step of a jog, but it knows it has exercised, and in the same way we do not remember many of our dreams, but our minds have been tuned for conscious awareness.
