Lucid Dreams

Lucid dreams are my favourite types of dreams, they are by far the most entertaining. Psychologist Frederik van Eeden came up with the term "lucid dreams". A lucid dream is a dream when the person sleeping is aware that he or she is asleep, the lucid dream can seem real or vivid depending on the sleeping person's self-awareness. But that is just lucid dreaming as a whole, there are different types of lucid dreams. One type is called dream-initiated lucid dream (DILD), this type of lucid dream starts as a "normal" dream, then the sleeping beauty concludes that "hey I'm dreaming". Another type of lucid dream is wake-initiated lucid dream (WILD), this is when a person goes from an awake state to a dream state, without a lapse in consciousness. WILD is similar to a hallucination, a wild hallucination. The third type of lucid dream is mnemonic-initiated lucid dream (MILD), this happens when a person says they will have a lucid dream the next time they take a trip to the unconscious. The next update will go more in depth with lucid dreams, maybe even how to MILDly dream.

Mysteries Behind Nightmares

A nightmare is a dream that causes a strong emotional response, fear or horror, from the sleeping person. Nightmares are caused by something physical or psychological. A psychological cause when a person is feeling anxious or stressed. A physical cause perhaps is when a person is in an uncomfortable position or has a fever. But the psychological cause tends to be more prominent than the physical. Nightmares are NOT from psychological disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Psychological DISORDERS cause night terrors which are completely different. So do not think that if you have or had nightmares you have a psychological disorder. Nightmares take place during REM (rapid eye movement) while night terrors take place in Stage four of the sleep cycle.

Nightmares are still dreams, the only difference between a "normal" dream and a nightmare is that nightmares evoke fear, while dreams do not. If you want to know why we have certain nightmares then you would have to analyze the latent content of the nightmare. For example, the nightmare I had that is on my previous post probably means that I am terrified of the strange and unknown. But the nightmare in itself was most likely brought on by anxiety. And the anxiety manifested itself using a nightmare. The nightmare that I have might not terrify you and the nightmare you have will necessarily terrify me, so nightmares are directed toward your anxiety.

Nightmares

Nightmares are terrifying. We have all have had them, some have them more than others. I am not one that has too many nightmares, but I remember this one quite well.

It was pitch black, and I was in an exact replica of my room. The bed, the walls, the wood floor, the clothes on the floor, everything was exactly like it was in real life. I was in my bed, lying there, curled up in a loose ball. My thoughts were floating around like always. All of a sudden, I felt large hands grab my ankles. I start kicking and thrashing, I tried to scream, but my throat was dry, no noise pierced the silence. The gruesome hands began to drag me out of bed onto the floor. I dug my nails into the wood floor, grabbing onto anything that I could. The intruder flipped me onto my side, I tried to reach for the door handle. Just then I woke up, I bolted up out of bed and freaked out. It was not one of my coolest dreams, but it was the most terrifying dream I have ever had, so realistic.

I hope you like the update. If you want, you can respond with some of your nightmares... or not, your choice.

Dream Interpretation II

Freud believed that our dreams are distorted because these distorted dreams are repressed thoughts and feelings. These distortions make the manifest content extremely different than the latent content that was reached from analysis. Freud believed that by reversing these distortions we can derive what the latent content means. The operations for the analysis of the latent content are condensation, displacement, representation, and symbolism. Condensation is one dream object stands for several associations and ideas. Condensation is a colleague, many ideas intertwined into one object. Displacement is a dream object's emotional significance is separated from its real content and attaches to a different emotion to not raise suspicion from the dreamer. Displacement is like a ninja, a master of deception. Representation is a thought that is translated to visual images. Representation, hallucination; very similar. Symbolism is a symbol that replaces a person, place, or thing. Yeah... a symbol explains itself.

Dream Interpretation

Dream interpretation, or analysis, was created by Freud as a way to understand the unconscious mind. Freud wrote a book called The Interpretation of Dreams to explain to the world his analysis of dreams. Freud's book first argues that dreams are "day residue", things that happened during the day or things that you wished happened during the day happen in your dreams. For example, in a small child's dream, a boy played with a turtle and had a thought that it would be cool if the turtle was able to talk. So in his dream he went deep sea diving with a large, talking turtle. In adults, dreams tend to be more complicated. Dreams are rarely cut and dry, subject to obvious interpretation. First, there is something called manifest content and latent content. Manifest content is the content of a dream that a person experiences and remembers. Latent content is the hidden and unconscious meaning of the dream. Our dreams are like a puzzle, something that we have to piece together to discern the latent content, which is to say, to figure out what the dream means.

Sigmund Freud was a famous psychologist who had revolutionized the world of psychology. One of Freud's greatest theories was about the unconscious, dreams, in Freud's words "the royal road to the unconscious". Freud did not discover the unconscious, but he did discover a method to for studying the unconscious. In Freud's book The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud describes how to access the unconscious. Another great attribute to psychology is dream analysis. Next time we will learn about dream analysis and analyze our dreams.

Background on Dreams

Dreams are very mysterious to us. Scientists and psychologists try to speculate how dreams effect our brains and bodies. We know a certain amount of facts about dreams, like how dreams occur during the REM (rapid eye movement) cycle of sleep. Science and new technologies have helped us discover the facts about sleep. But, why we dream is still a mystery. Most of the ways to answer why we dream are theories or ideas from psychologists. One famous psychologist that tried to understand dreams was Sigmund Freud. In the next update Freud's dream theory and ideas will be discussed.

To me, dreams have always been something new and exciting, something to look forward to while sleeping. Dreams have always been the best part of closing your eyes and drifting off, not to nothingness, but to a world where anything can happen, a world located in the deep dark places of our mind, figuratively of course. This blog will have to do with exploring the "unconscious" mind. This blog will consist of facts about dreams and sleep, since dreaming is quite hard to accomplish without sleep, and also the discussion of the dreams that we, the writer and the reader, have had in the previous nights.