Sweet dreams? Not always!

The time we spend asleep should all be restful. For the sake of those with whom we share our beds, we should lie still and make as little noise as possible. For our own sakes, we should be able to wake feeling refreshed. Unfortunately, the allocated time for sleeping can be filled with movement, noise and disturbed sleep. The main classification of sleep disorders involving movement and behavior is called parasomnia. It comes into play as partial awakening as you slip into and out of REM sleep, or just as you are falling asleep or slowly waking up. As to movement, some sleepers regularly move their arms and legs around. In most cases, this will be determined, but relatively gentle. In a few cases, the movements can be quite violent. Then there is sleepwalking. This affects children as they approach their teens and about 5% of adults at various times during their life. In most cases, people simply move around the home and then return to bed. But a few go through household routines involving eating or, in rare cases, driving. Obviously, at such times, the sleepers may be a danger to themselves in picking entirely unsuitable things to eat, or in attempting to control a vehicle while semiconscious. One of the more interesting of the parasomnias is the so-called sleep or night terrors. Everyone dreams. This is marked by rapid eye movement (REM). In most cases, we have no memory of the dreams. It's only if the dreams come while we are beginning to approach consciousness that we can understand and remember the content of the dream. Most of the time, we have sweet dreams with only the occasional nightmare. However, in a small number of people (estimated to affect about 2% of the adult population at some point during their lives), dreams turn into physical panic. This is not the usual REM dream. This is a moment of complete panic as the dreamer attempts to wake. He or she may move convulsively, shout in fear, and perhaps sit up. Then, he or she will turn over and return to full sleep. There's usually no memory of this when waking naturally in the morning. This disorder most often affects people who have recently been through a traumatic experience and they will have terror attacks most nights unless they go through therapy to come to terms with the psychological causes of the repeated fear. In such people, the use of sleeping pills like ambien is not recommended. Sleeping pills are a highly effective way of ensuring people get to sleep or stay asleep during the night. But they are not a form of psychotherapy. If someone is suffering from an anxiety or stress disorder, taking ambien may actually make the problems worse. There are an increasing number of instances where people on sleeping pills are sleepwalking. These pills do not ensure that people remain inactive during their sleep. For night terrors, the only drugs likely to be effective are for the control of anxiety disorders or antidepressants. This article should reinforce the idea that you should always get a doctor to diagnose your condition and advise on the most appropriate treatment. You should not self-medicate with ambien just because you have a sleep disorder

Meaning Of Color Dreams

Dreams in colors not only set the mood in a dream but actually determines the meaning and outcome of the dream. Dreams in color based on the intensity of the colors which affect the meanings of dreams pose no threat to you and are generally sent from God or are borne out of our own wants and desires.


How Colors Affect Your Dreams

Black, the color black represents Satan, demons, evil spirits, dark influences, illusion, phony agreements, promises to be broken, false words of assurance, deception, lies, betrayal and truth mixed with lies. This is magnified if there is any gray in the dream, or when you see black or shadowy images in the dream.

Black & White Dreams are usually demonic in nature and represent total illusion, camouflage, deception, treachery, hidden agenda, lies, danger, a warning of attacks, especially if there is anything or anyone in the dream gray, pale, hazy or there are shadows in the dream. This type of dream can be a warning to you to be careful whom you trust or place your confidence in the natural. Dreams that are black-and-white, have black in them or images or shadows of black and gray are usually demonic dreams leaving you with a feeling of danger, fear and the unknown.

Despite the dream appearing to be good and you're thinking it's a dream sent to you from God, you must be very cautious. To see the color black in a dream represents an illusion counterfeit of something good, however to confuse you, the dream will have small morsels of truth interspersed heavily with lies, giving you an illusion of truthfulness, really meant only to deceive you.

The only time you should consider a black-and-white dream would be if the dream contains some light within the dream and the black-and-white colors are vividly clear and easy to see. Before you take anything serious about what you see in a dream with the colors black or dark shadows, you should go to God, pray and ask for in prayer for the counsel of the Spirit of God that you not deceived.

Pastel colors: Faded or washed-out colors in dreams represent illusion, camouflage, secrets, deception, lies and a hidden agenda.

Medium intensity colors represent truth, veracity, honesty, sincerity, accuracy and messenger bringing help or good news. Deeper hued and strong colors represent determination, strength, power, authority, steadfastness, strong will, the ability to see a project or idea through to its completion. Deeper hues of colors also represent integrity, honor, reliability and a person who is forthright.

Bright colors represent insight, information, knowledge, wisdom, answers solutions and hope. Vivid colors represent God working with you through situations, problems and obstacles for good in your life. Illuminated, glowing colors: Radiant colors represent God intervening in your life through answers to prayers, healings, emotionally, physically and spiritually. Illuminated colors also represent instruction from God and a way made clear.

Blue - Medium Blue - Light Blue represents God, peace, harmony, security, tranquility, wisdom, purity, revelation and a spiritual breakthrough. The color blue when not mixed with any other color also represents blessings in your family, health and job. In some cases, a deep royal blue in a dream represents a wonder.

Light Blue - Dark Blue represents a new beginning or phenomenal breakthrough in your career, family, marriage or relationships. Light blue-dark blues also represents the loving sacrifices in your devotion, caring and compassionate nature you willingly display toward family and friends. If in the dream the blue is a deep royal blue represents wisdom, purity, revelations of information, good news and a breakthrough you're about to receive. The breakthrough most likely involves your family, health or job.

Light blue represents bondage, illusion, sin, to be deceived or to be deceitful toward others. If in a dream you destroy, cover or deface any blue object represents a rebellion side, pride, disorderly events, thinking and actions, a disbelieving nature in your heart with your refusal to see the truth when God reveals solutions to you concerning a problem you're experiencing, especially when the solutions involves a friend, mate or a family member.

To wear blue clothing or a blue covering in your dream or to dream you are under a blue sky or in a blue room represents a new beginning, peace, harmony, tranquility and security. Under a blue sky or wearing blue clothing also represents a secret or information you need will be forthcoming. The symbolic meaning of the color blue in a dream depends on what is blue in the dream and how dark the blue is.

Dark or medium blue represents the love, unyielding devotion, caring involvement, compassionate personal sacrifices you readily demonstrate towards family and friends. When the blue in the dream is a deep blue represents a pure heart, wisdom gained to apply revelatory insights of dream messages, good news and a breakthrough you're about to receive from God. The breakthrough invariably relates to your family, health or job. In special cases, a deep blue in a dream, especially a dark blue stone or gem in a dream represents a miracle you've prayed deeply for.

What Thoughts Wake You Up at Night?

I asked through Facebook and Twitter "What thoughts wake you up at night?" The response was varied; from nonsensical to downright scary.

"Gee, the idea of munching on some (fill in the blank with just about anything vegetarian) sounds great." "Where is my handbag?" "Did we lock the security gate?" "Why are the dogs so quiet?"

And several matched the thought that woke me up the other night:

"I gotta pee."

It's one thing to be awoken by your kids making noise in the next room and quite another when it's you who is sabotaging your own restful night.Thoughts that wake you up in the middle of the night engulfed in worry or fear is a common indicator of stress. The pressures and uncertainties in your daily life visit you through dreams and symbolic thoughts. Sometimes these dreams and thoughts jar you back into consciousness yet the feelings that evoked the rude jolt to healthy sleeping patterns remain.

These feelings are indicators for you to examine to reveal a greater understanding of yourself and what you experience. A dream in which you are worried, scared, or stressed in any way is a reflection of the dis-ease you are experiencing in your waking life.

According to the Dictionary of Dreams, the following symbols may shed some light on what the above thoughts may indicate as deep rooted feelings and fears that are getting in the way of emotional and physical well being:

eating food - This may be an indicator that the dreamer is concerned about a weight problem or eating disorder. It may be a health warning to draw attention to one's eating habits or weight problem. (although the veggie munching response to my query above could have been sent in fun and humor)

search - Search and not find: Instills the need to find something that is lacking within. Can be spiritual or need for self-examination. Search and find: Signal of accomplishment and self-capability.

gate - Closed: An opportunity for you to decide upon. Open: The beginning of an opportunity to leave your current situation.

intruder - Someone or something has interfered with your peace of mind by forcing a situation upon you.

burglar - An intruder, unwelcome person or event, loss of something. Being forcibly deprived by someone's actions.

With regard to the need to pee - when ya gotta go, ya gotta go!

Most dreams contain messages that serve to teach you something about yourself. Recurring dreams and wake-up thoughts are triggered by a life circumstance that keeps repeating itself. They are a message from your Higher Self to pay attention to, examine, and form a new perspective around the hidden meaning behind the dream symbol. Without judgment of any kind, look within yourself and face whatever you find in your exploration of what is the underlying stress.

Chances are you have placed yourself as a victim in your worry. Any area where you give up your personal power, your ability and responsibility to intentionally create your experiences, you will suffer with stress or anxiety. Know that you are a victim to no one and no circumstance unless you allow yourself to be. Whether a horrible thing happened to you or could happen to you is not what is creating stress. What brings on worry, doubt and fear is what you have the event mean for or about you in your life moving forward. You have absolute power over how you choose to experience any event in your life, unless you relinquish it. When you let go of your power you deny your self.

To reclaim your personal power focus upon all that you have done and achieved in your life. I'll bet that anything you set your mind to and were passionate about you have either achieved or are in the process of making it a real experience. Instead of giving up on yourself you were able to overcome obstacles, reach for new perspectives and new ideas when the going got tough. Do the same thing now with whatever wakes you up at night, Reach for a newer and better perspective. Take back your power and responsibility so that you can dream sweet dreams and enjoy restful nights.

Turning Ideas, Goals, and Dreams Into Reality

The best way to make a goal or idea materialize is to learn how to make it persist. Have you ever been sidetracked from a good idea, a meaningful goal, or your dream because you did not quite know how to make it materialize? The ability to make your ideas or dreams a reality is not only a key factor of success, it is also an indispensable asset to achieving happiness, or to one's ability to recover quickly from unexpected setbacks. It takes a tremendous amount of mental fortitude, realistic thinking, and creative problem solving to be able to achieve the success and happiness one desires out of life. These are just some of the conditions and actions that it takes, in order to have an idea materialize, or make a dream come true. Persistence is not just the ability to keep on keeping on; it is also the very essence of making ideas and dreams a reality.

Nothing can exist, survive, or last unless it can also persist. With that being said, how do you make an idea persist, until it materializes? How do you maintain your motivation and drive in the face of challenges? Most importantly, how can you free yourself from the elasticity of recurring problems, so that you can move forward with less effort or stress - and with greater effectiveness? The key here is to know and fully understand what the elements of persistence are, and use them to take effective actions that will get you results. No solution is useful to anyone unless they know about it and feel certain they can use it to accomplish the results they desire. Allow me to introduce the book and workbook Secrets of the Art of Persistence - solutions for turning your ideas and dreams into reality.

Dreams Or Goals?

Many of us have big dreams and high aspirations; there is nothing wrong with this. If no one ever dreamt big we wouldn't have people like Donald Trump. Trump himself has said "As long as you're going to be thinking anyway, think big."

In order to even gain a quarter of Trump's success you must set high goals and aim for a better lifestyle, although, you must realize the difference between a goal and a dream. A day dream explained by psychologist Eric Klinger "is a visionary fantasy experienced while awake, especially one of happy, pleasant thoughts, hopes or ambitions." The key term is FANTASY. A day dream is only that, a dream, it has no base and no means of actualization. Day dreaming will lead you away from being aware of your surroundings. This kind of thought will lead you down a path of disappointment because when you are not aware of the world around you, you will have no idea how to conquer it.

Well you may then say "When I daydream they are things I really want!" There is nothing wrong with that. You can and should desire to live the lifestyle you desire. But you also must realize that simply signing up as a representative will not make you a desired $50,000 a month. If your lifestyle choice requires you to make that much you must realize your goals to get there. Thinking of the car, home, or TV you could purchase on that budget is not the goal but it is motivation.

Using that motivation set incremental goals starting from the top. No matter how motivated you are this will help you be realistic and avoid the discouragement that causes so many network marketers to quit. So start with you main goal: $50k a month. When do you want it by? The shorter the main goal the harder you will have to work to get it i.e. if you want $50k in six months it will require twice the amount of work as to making $50k in twelve months. Now break down that goal as to how much money you will make each month leading up to your main objective. This will keep you on task and allow you to adjust your work ethic each month depending on how close you are to your monthly financial goal.

Now that you have broken down your finical goals and set out a time line you now need to figure out what will get you to each of those monthly goals. For example if your next month's goal is to make $4,000 and to do so you need to sign up 6 reps and sell 30 points worth of product or services then this is your monthly goal. Now 6 new reps are not going to magically appear. You need to present your opportunity on a daily basis to as many people you think necessary so that you obtain the six reps, but to at least one person a day 5 days a week. Also determine who you will be selling your product or services to; 5 points need to be sold a week. So now you have your weekly goals: 1 presentation a day, 5 points of product or service sold during the week.

Review your goals on a weekly basis and analyze where you stand. By breaking down your goals based upon your motivation you will be able to better stay focused and achieve your dreams.

Remember your goals must have an end date and must be measurable. In this manner you can take your dreams turn it into motivation be successful. Your dreams are real and you want them. Don't let anyone take your dreams away but you must be strong and work hard to obtain them. Dale Carnegie has said "Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do." Don't be a fool and don't let fools strip you of what you wish for your life and your family.

Sweet dreams are made of geomagnetic activity

Looking for an explanation for recurring nightmares of leaving the house without your trousers on or losing your teeth? New research suggests you can blame the Earth's magnetic field, rather than a repressed childhood.

Darren Lipnicki, a psychologist formerly at the Center for Space Medicine in Berlin, Germany, found a correlation between the bizarreness of his dreams, recorded over eight years, and extremes in local geomagnetic activity.

Other studies have tied low geomagnetic activity to increases in the production of the melatonin, a potent hormone that helps set the body's circadian clock. So, based on anecdotal evidence that melatonin supplements used as a sleeping aid can cause off-kilter dreams, Lipnicki wondered whether local magnetic fields could induce the same effects.
Bizarreness barometer

Between 1990 and 1997, he kept meticulous records of his nightly reveries, amassing a total 2387 written accounts during his teenage years. "I always wanted to do science with them," he says.

For the study, he devised a five-point scoring system to rate the bizarreness of these dreams. On the low end are dreams completely representative of reality – "I am sitting at a table doing some maths or physics homework," for instance.

Dreams that scored a three could happen, but seemed unlikely. For example: "A friend is in the backyard of my house, building a wooden platform atop of 7-foot high stilts."

The most bizarre dreams that Lipnicki recorded had little or no connection with reality: "I was stranded on a foreign coastline with a monkey that spoke English and a woman that suddenly became small, almost doll-sized. Then I was at home."
Dream result

Lipnicki looked up daily geomagnetic activity in Perth, Australia – his home at the time. A scale called the k-index quantifies local geomagnetic activity, and he included only days that scored on the extremes of this index. This whittled his dream log down to 66 days of low geomagnetic activity and 70 days of high activity.

Using these figures, Lipnicki uncovered a statistical correlation between dream bizarreness and geomagnetic activity, with freakier dreams occurring on days with the least geomagnetic activity.

Of course, this correlation doesn't prove that the Earth's magnetic activity determines whether we dream of a mundane day at the park or something more like an LSD trip. But a larger and better controlled study may be worth pursuing, Lipnicki says. "At this stage, it's just putting the idea out there."

Learn Some Techniques of Lucid Dreaming

Have you ever experienced a dream whose results you could determine, and where you could do anything at will? Then perhaps you were able to have a "lucid dream," which occurs when you know that you are dreaming, and can thus manipulate your dream to suit your needs.

Sweet dreaming is a common phenomenon which has been used as the theme of movies and books, and which is the focus of interest of psychologists, New Age groups, and artists alike. Because they often feel real, lucid dreams can often be more memorable than any other kind of dream. Even the pain of nightmares can be offset by lucid dreaming, which is why some psychologists recommend that their patients intentionally have lucid dreams, so that the patients can rid themselves of any torment or inner strife that may impair them in the daytime.

Although lucid dreaming is relatively rare, it can be achieved with different techniques, and this means you are no different. Before lucid dreaming can be done, however, you have to recognize that you are dreaming. You can do this by looking for "dream signs", which can be identified by performing the following "reality tests".

1. If you are confronted with text or a clock in a dream, read the text or the time, look away, and then look at the text or time again. In the real world, text and time will not change; in the dream world, however, text and time will alter drastically.

2. Switch on electronic objects, or look at reflective objects. Electronic switches such as light switches will not usually work in the dream world. Mirrors will be blurred, or will show distorted images.

3. Try to inflict pain on yourself, or keep yourself from breathing. If you feel your chest tighten, or if you feel little or no resistance or pain on your skin, then you may be in a dream state.

4. Observe your environment: do you see talking animals? Are there purple dogs and green horses? Do buildings suddenly get up and dance? You may be dreaming.

Not everyone can have lucid dreams. There are many factors that affect such ability, including meditation and age. If you do wish to have lucid dreams, and you can recognize that you are in the dream state, then you can get started with any of the following techniques.

In Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreaming (MILD), all you need to do is to prepare yourself mentally for lucid dreaming. While you fall asleep, remind yourself, over and over, to watch out for dream signs, and to know that you are dreaming.

The easiest way to start sweet dreaming is the Wake-back-to-bed Induction Technique (WBTB). This exploits the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) cycles, which indicate deep sleep and lucid dreaming, and which get longer in the latter parts of the night. To employ WBTB, go to sleep tired, then wake up in five hours' time. As soon as you are awake, direct all your thoughts on the will to make yourself have lucid dreams while keeping yourself awake for an hour. When you are finished with the hour of focus, go back to sleep. Not only may you have lucid dreams, you will have them longer, and more vivid.

A common technique is called Waking Induction of Lucid Dreaming (WILD). This involves going from the waking state directly to the lucid dream state. To use WILD, you have to recognize that you have reached the border between waking and sleeping, and you have to remain aware of your state. You may be able to enter a dream with complete awareness, and an ability to change events to suit your needs.

Another effective method is the Cycle Adjustment Technique (CAT), which means adjusting your sleep hours so that you are more alert during the later portions of your sleep. To do so, try to wake up about an hour and a half before you normally do, and continue to do so until your cycles are completely adjusted. This heightened awareness of having to wake up; alternating with normal hours of waking at the usual time, actually makes the body more aware of the dreaming state, and can induce lucid dreaming.

Don Juan's Technique is also like MILD, except that it requires focus on your hands. All you have to do is to stare at your hands before going to sleep, then telling yourself (preferably aloud) that when you look at your hands later, you will realize that you are in a dream state. When you do reach the dream state, look at your hands again, repeat the words to yourself, and continue to do so to keep your awareness during the entire dream.

Lucid dreaming experts recommend three basic steps to induce a lucid dream. First, you have to relax as you go to sleep. Second, remain aware of your dream state. Last, enter your dream, and continue to remain aware of the state, all while enjoying what your dream can offer. In lucid dreaming, you can fly, run at impossible speeds, experience activities that you might not normally do while you are awake, get ideas for a novel or work of art, and even rehearse scenarios that you might encounter in real life!

Once you know that you are dreaming, remember every single detail of your dream. Try to manipulate the dream to suit your preferences. If you can, keep a dream journal, along with a pen, on your bedside table. As soon as you wake up from your dream, relax, keep your eyes closed to remember as many details as possible, then open your journal and write everything down.

Lucid dreaming can be done by everyone, and its benefits can be enjoyed by all. If lucid dreaming can rid us of our inner demons, then by all means, let the sleeping begin!

Lucid Dreaming: How To Have A Lucid Dream

Maybe pigs cannot fly yet, but you sure can. At least in your dreams. Lucid dreaming is a mysterious art form that many people wish they could master. You may have experienced a lucid dream, in which you were aware you were dreaming.

But would it not be great if you could have that self-awareness on a regular basis, and as a result able to influence your dreams?

Dreaming is realizing you are dreaming as you dream. When you reach the Lucid Dreaming state, you will be able to control your dreams and experience anything you wish.

Maybe you would like to take a flight through the sky or make other impossible things possible. Or maybe you would like to tell your boss you think he is unfair, without getting fired in real life.

There are many appeals to lucid dreaming, and if you can learn the elusive skill, then a world of excitement and an opportunity for personal growth await you.

I remember standing out on a deck in the foggy night air and having a most peculiar, amazing thought: I am dreaming right now. I can walk through walls. And then I immediately walked through a wall! Well, at least in my dream!

I will never forget this accidental lucid dream and I certainly would like to experience something like that again. But how? In order to become an expert lucid dreamer, you must understand the basics of the art.

1) Why not just have normal dreams?

What is the effect of lucid dreaming? Not only do we all desire to control our environment and make fantastical things happen, but a dream is a safe place to rehearse for our waking life.

This is not to say our real world fears and anxieties do not follow us into our sleep, but no character or plot we conjure up in our dreams can physically harm us and no one but the dreamer will know what happens in a dream.

This means that a baseball player can practice his swing, a politician can practice her speech, or a newly widowed man can find love again - all without actual consequences.

Lucid dreaming gives people a forum; a place they can test the water or fulfill their desires. It also gives them a place to confront their fears. When we are able to control our dreams, we can turn those nightmares into memorable, productive fantasies.

2) How to lucid dream

Many folks spend years and years perfecting the craft of lucid dreaming, but if you are like me, you are not about to dedicate your time and energy to such an endeavor.

After all, you probably have a full-time job or children to worry about! So what are some simple tips to having clear, lucid dreams? Luckily, there are easy things you and I can do to control our dreams.

a. Keep a dream journal

The first step toward effective lucid dreaming is to log all your dreams on paper. As soon as you wake up from a dream, jot down everything you remember from it.

Do this every morning as well. The better your dream recall, the better your ability to lucid dream will be. One of the goals of maintaining a dream diary is to find out if you are already having lucid dreams as is! You may very well be.

b. Notice trends

Now that you have a log of your dreams, you can begin to take them apart. Are there patterns to your dreams? For example, do certain objects always show up, is there a setting that you commonly dream about, do you feel your dream is first or third person, etc?

Once you notice these regularities, you can then train yourself to respond to them with the question - Am I dreaming or is this real?

If you raise your self-consciousness and doubt, lucid dreaming is all the more possible.

c. Expect to lucid dream

Every night before you go to sleep, write down on paper - I will have a lucid dream.

Studies have shown that when you suggest things to your subconscious, while conscious, your suggestions are often taken to heart!

So if you plan on having a lucid dream, say so.

d. Short is not as sweet

Many people complain that they cannot prolong their lucid dreams. There are three techniques to doing just that. When you realize you are in a dream, spin around, rub your hands together, and focus on an object in it, repeating to yourself - the next scene will be a dream.

After you practice some of these techniques, you may want to invest in lucid dreaming products and courses too.

One of the biggest mysteries about lucid dreaming is whether or not the ancient art serves to increase the frequency of lucid dreams or on the other hand, simply improves lucid dream recall.

Either way, the more aware we are of our dreams, the more aware we will be in our waking life. If we want clarity about real world problems, we can gain it by having clarity in our dreams!

Lucid dreaming is closely related to astral projection! So, I would be sharing some of my lucid dreaming journeys here and I wish you many sweet lucid dreams this evening.

I Was Dreaming That I Met A Girl: What Does It Mean?

Question: I was dreaming that I met a girl I liked at school on the road and we had sex and she was like an animal. Then after I wanted to find her so I could ask her out. I tried looking everywhere for her but I couldn't find her. Is this common and what does it mean?

Well, they don't call them Dream Girls for no reason! Actually, it is hard to say what a dream means to another individual -- that is best left up to the dreamer to decide. However, these kinds of dreams bring out some interesting observations by psychologists. The first is the idea of what is called the autonomous psyche -- that our imagination is much more independent that we know. At one moment it provides us with our hearts desire, and at another it seems to keep what we want most away from us.

Sigmund Freud felt that the dream maker had to strike a balance between the two so we don't wake up all the time. Carl Jung found that by cooperating with this tension we can become more wholesome beings. In this sense, the tension would be between having what we want, and moving towards something better. Jung felt that dream girls (or boys) teased and played with us to draw us into a larger way of being.

If this were my dream, for example, the searching for the girl might be a way to keep me in school. If we could just have each other all the time, I might not return to the school. Another psychologist, Jacques Lacan, sees the continual searching for desire as the way of the world and teaches that instead of trying to always get what we want, we are really better off focusing more on the search itself. In this vain, it becomes my task to clearly express my loss of her, just exactly what it is that is missing and what my desire really is and can be. These are three levels at work in all dreams, there are many more, but it sounds like I better not give the whole story away just yet!

Lucid Dreaming: Awake in Your Sleep?

What could it mean to be conscious in your dreams? For most of us, dreaming is something quite separate from normal life. When we wake up from being chased by a ferocious tiger, or seduced by a devastatingly good-looking Nobel Prize winner we realize with relief or disappointment that "it was only a dream."

Yet there are some dreams that are not like that. Lucid dreams are dreams in which you know at the time that you are dreaming. That they are different from ordinary dreams is obvious as soon as you have one. The experience is something like waking up in your dreams. It is as though you "come to" and find you are dreaming.

Sweet dreams used to be a topic within psychical research and parapsychology. Perhaps their incomprehensibility made them good candidates for being thought paranormal. More recently, however, they have begun to appear in psychology journals and have dropped out of parapsychology—a good example of how the field of parapsychology shrinks when any of its subject matter is actually explained.

Lucidity has also become something of a New Age fad. There are machines and gadgets you can buy and special clubs you can join to learn how to induce lucid dreams. But this commercialization should not let us lose sight of the very real fascination of lucid dreaming. It forces us to ask questions about the nature of consciousness, deliberate control over our actions, and the nature of imaginary worlds.

A Real Dream or Not?
The term lucid dreaming was coined by the Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden in 1913. It is something of a misnomer since it means something quite different from just clear or vivid dreaming. Nevertheless we are certainly stuck with it. Van Eeden explained that in this sort of dream "the re-integration of the psychic functions is so complete that the sleeper reaches a state of perfect awareness and is able to direct his attention, and to attempt different acts of free volition. Yet the sleep, as I am able confidently to state, is undisturbed, deep, and refreshing."

This implied that there could be consciousness during sleep, a claim many psychologists denied for more than 50 years. Orthodox sleep researchers argued that lucid dreams could not possibly be real dreams. If the accounts were valid, then the experiences must have occurred during brief moments of wakefulness or in the transition between waking and sleeping, not in the kind of deep sleep in which rapid eye movements (REMs) and ordinary dreams usually occur. In other words, they could not really be dreams at all.

This presented a challenge to lucid dreamers who wanted to convince people that they really were awake in their dreams. But of course when you are deep asleep and dreaming you cannot shout, "Hey! Listen to me. I’m dreaming right now." All the muscles of the body are paralyzed.

It was Keith Hearne (1978), of the University of Hull, who first exploited the fact that not all the muscles are paralyzed. In REM sleep the eyes move. So perhaps a lucid dreamer could signal by moving the eyes in a predetermined pattern. Just over ten years ago, lucid dreamer Alan Worsley first managed this in Hearne’s laboratory. He decided to move his eyes left and right eight times in succession whenever he became lucid. Using a polygraph, Hearne could watch the eye movements for signs of the special signal. He found it in the midst of REM sleep. So lucid dreams are real dreams and do occur during REM sleep.

Further research showed that Worsley’s lucid dreams most often occurred in the early morning, around 6:30 A M, nearly half an hour into a REM period and toward the end of a burst of rapid eye movements. They usually lasted for two to five minutes. Later research showed that they occur at times of particularly high arousal during REM sleep (Hearne 1978).

It is sometimes said that discoveries in science happen when the time is right for them. It was one of those odd things that at just the same time, but unbeknown to Hearne, Stephen LaBerge, at Stanford University in California, was trying the same experiment. He too succeeded, but resistance to the idea was very strong. In 1980, both Science and Nature rejected his first paper on the discovery (LaBerge 1985). It was only later that it became clear what an important step this had been.

An Identifiable State?
It would be especially interesting if lucid dreams were associated with a unique physiological state. In fact this has not been found, although this is not very surprising since the same is true of other altered states, such as out-of-body experiences and trances of various kinds. However, lucid dreams do tend to occur in periods of higher cortical arousal. Perhaps a certain threshold of arousal has to be reached before awareness can be sustained.

The beginning of lucidity (marked by eye signals, of course) is associated with pauses in breathing, brief changes in heart rate, and skin response changes, but there is no unique combination that allows the lucidity to be identified by an observer.

In terms of the dream itself, there are several features that seem to provoke lucidity. Sometimes heightened anxiety or stress precedes it. More often there is a kind of intellectual recognition that something "dreamlike" or incongruous is going on (Fox 1962; Green 1968; LaBerge 1985).

It is common to wake from an ordinary dream and wonder, "How on earth could I have been fooled into thinking that I was really doing pushups on a blue beach?" A little more awareness is shown when we realize this in the dream. If you ask yourself, "Could this be a dream?" and answer "No" (or don’t answer at all), this is called a pre-lucid dream. Finally, if you answer "Yes," it becomes a fully lucid dream.

It could be that once there is sufficient cortical arousal it is possible to apply a bit of critical thought; to remember enough about how the world ought to be to recognize the dream world as ridiculous, or perhaps to remember enough about oneself to know that these events can’t be continuous with normal waking life. However, tempting as it is to conclude that the critical insight produces the lucidity, we have only an apparent correlation and cannot deduce cause and effect from it.

Becoming a Lucid Dreamer
Surveys have shown that about 50 percent of people (and in some cases more) have had at least one lucid dream in their lives. (See, for example, Blackmore 1982; Gackenbach and LaBerge 1988; Green 1968.) Of course surveys are unreliable in that many people may not understand the question. In particular, if you have never had a lucid dream, it is easy to misunderstand what is meant by the term. So overestimates might be expected. Beyond this, it does not seem that surveys can find out much. There are no very consistent differences between lucid dreamers and others in terms of age, sex, education, and so on (Green 1968; Gackenbach and LaBerge 1988).

For many people, having lucid dreams is fun, and they want to learn how to have more or to induce them at will. One finding from early experimental work was that high levels of physical (and emotional) activity during the day tend to precede lucidity at night. Waking during the night and carrying out some kind of activity before falling asleep again can also encourage a lucid dream during the next REM period and is the basis of some induction techniques.

Many methods have been developed (Gackenbach and Bosveld 1989; Tart 1988; Price and Cohen 1988). They roughly fall into three categories.

One of the best known is LaBerge’s MILD (Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreaming). This is done on waking in the early morning from a dream. You should wake up fully, engage in some activity like reading or walking about, and then lie down to go to sleep again. Then you must imagine yourself asleep and dreaming, rehearse the dream from which you woke, and remind yourself, "Next time I dream this I want to remember I’m dreaming."

A second approach involves constantly reminding yourself to become lucid throughout the day rather than the night. This is based on the idea that we spend most of our time in a kind of waking daze. If we could be more lucid in waking life, perhaps we could be more lucid while dreaming. German psychologist Paul Tholey suggests asking yourself many times every day, "Am I dreaming or not?" This sounds easy but is not. It takes a lot of determination and persistence not to forget all about it. For those who do forget, French researcher Clerc suggests writing a large "C" on your hand (for "conscious") to remind you (Tholey 1983; Gackenbach and Bosveld 1989).

This kind of method is similar to the age-old technique for increasing awareness by meditation and mindfulness. Advanced practitioners of meditation claim to maintain awareness through a large proportion of their sleep. TM is often claimed to lead to sleep awareness. So perhaps it is not surprising that some recent research finds associations between meditation and increased lucidity (Gackenbach and Bosveld 1989).

The third and final approach requires a variety of gadgets. The idea is to use some sort of external signal to remind people, while they are actually in REM sleep, that they are dreaming. Hearne first tried spraying water onto sleepers’ faces or hands but found it too unreliable. This sometimes caused them to incorporate water imagery into their dreams, but they rarely became lucid. He eventually decided to use a mild electric shock to the wrist. His "dream machine" detects changes in breathing rate (which accompany the onset of REM) and then automatically delivers a shock to the wrist (Hearne 1990).

Meanwhile, in California, LaBerge was rejecting taped voices and vibrations and working instead with flashing lights. The original version was laboratory based and used a personal computer to detect the eye movements of REM sleep and to turn on flashing lights whenever the REMs reached a certain level. Eventually, however, all the circuitry was incorporated into a pair of goggles. The idea is to put the goggles on at night, and the lights will flash only when you are asleep and dreaming. The user can even control the level of eye movements at which the lights begin to flash.

The newest version has a chip incorporated into the goggles. This will not only control the lights but will store data on eye-movement density during the night and when and for how long the lights were flashing, making fine tuning possible. At the moment, the first users have to join in workshops at LaBerge’s Lucidity Institute and learn how to adjust the settings, but within a few months he hopes the whole process will be fully automated. (See LaBerge’s magazine, DreamLight. )

LaBerge tested the effectiveness of the Dream Light on 44 subjects who came into the laboratory, most for just one night. Fifty-five percent had at least one lucid dream and two had their first-ever lucid dream this way. The results suggested that this method is about as successful as MILD, but using the two together is the most effective (LaBerge 1985).
Lucid Dreams as an Experimental Tool

There are a few people who can have lucid dreams at will. And the increase in induction techniques has provided many more subjects who have them frequently. This has opened the way to using lucid dreams to answer some of the most interesting questions about sleep and dreaming.

How long do dreams take? In the last century, Alfred Maury had a long and complicated dream that led to his being beheaded by a guillotine. He woke up terrified, and found that the headboard of his bed had fallen on his neck. From this, the story goes, he concluded that the whole dream had been created in the moment of awakening.

This idea seems to have got into popular folklore but was very hard to test. Researchers woke dreamers at various stages of their REM period and found that those who had been longer in REM claimed longer dreams. However, accurate timing became possible only when lucid dreamers could send "markers" from the dream state.

LaBerge asked his subjects to signal when they became lucid and then count a ten-second period and signal again. Their average interval was 13 seconds, the same as they gave when awake. Lucid dreamers, like Alan Worsley, have also been able to give accurate estimates of the length of whole dreams or dream segments (Schatzman, Worsley, and Fenwick 1988).
Dream Actions
As we watch sleeping animals it is often tempting to conclude that they are moving their eyes in response to watching a dream, or twitching their legs as they dream of chasing prey. But do physical movements actually relate to the dream events?

Early sleep researchers occasionally reported examples like a long series of left-right eye movements when a dreamer had been dreaming of watching a ping-pong game, but they could do no more than wait until the right sort of dream came along.

Lucid dreaming made proper experimentation possible, for the subjects could be asked to perform a whole range of tasks in their dreams. In one experiment with researchers Morton Schatzman and Peter Fenwick, in London, Worsley planned to draw large triangles and to signal with flicks of his eyes every time he did so. While he dreamed, the electromyogram, recording small muscle movements, showed not only the eye signals but spikes of electrical activity in the right forearm just afterward. This showed that the preplanned actions in the dream produced corresponding muscle movements (Schatzman, Worsley, and Fenwick 1988).

Further experiments, with Worsley kicking dream objects, writing with umbrellas, and snapping his fingers, all confirmed that the muscles of the body show small movements corresponding to the body’s actions in the dream. The question about eye movements was also answered. The eyes do track dream objects. Worsley could even produce slow scanning movements, which are very difficult to produce in the absence of a "real" stimulus (Schatzman, Worsley, and Fenwick 1g88).

LaBerge was especially interested in breathing during dreams. This stemmed from his experiences at age five when he had dreamed of being an undersea pirate who could stay under water for very long periods without drowning. Thirty years later he wanted to find out whether dreamers holding their breath in dreams do so physically as well. The answer was yes. He and other lucid dreamers were able to signal from the dream and then hold their breath. They could also breathe rapidly in their dreams, as revealed on the monitors. Studying breathing during dreamed speech, he found that the person begins to breathe out at the start of an utterance just as in real speech (LaBerge and Dement 1982a).
Hemispheric Differences

It is known that the left and right hemispheres are activated differently during different kinds of tasks. For example, singing uses the right hemisphere more, while counting and other, more analytical tasks use the left hemisphere more. By using lucid dreams, LaBerge was able to find out whether the same is true in dreaming.

In one dream he found himself flying over a field. (Flying is commonly associated with lucid dreaming.) He signaled with his eyes and began to sing "Row, row, row your boat...." He then made another signal and counted slowly to ten before signaling again. The brainwave records showed just the same patterns of activation that you would expect if he had done these tasks while awake (LaBerge and Dement 1982b).

Dream Sex
Although it is not often asked experimentally, I am sure plenty of people have wondered what is happening in their bodies while they have their most erotic dreams.

LaBerge tested a woman who could dream lucidly at will and could direct her dreams to create the sexual experiences she wanted. (What a skill!) Using appropriate physiological recording, he was able to show that her dream orgasms were matched by true orgasms (LaBerge, Greenleaf, and Kedzierski 1983).

Experiments like these show that there is a close correspondence between actions of the dreamer and, if not real movements, at least electrical responses. This puts lucid dreaming somewhere between real actions, in which the muscles work to move the body, and waking imagery, in which they are rarely involved at all. So what exactly is the status of the dream world?

The Nature of the Dream World

It is tempting to think that the real world and the world of dreams are totally separate. Some of the experiments already mentioned show that there is no absolute dividing line. There are also plenty of stories that show the penetrability of the boundary.

Alan Worsley describes one experiment in which his task was to give himself a prearranged number of small electric shocks by means of a machine measuring his eye movements. He went to sleep and began dreaming that it was raining and he was in a sleeping bag by a fence with a gate in it. He began to wonder whether he was dreaming and thought it would be cheating to activate the shocks if he was awake. Then, while making the signals, he worried about the machine, for it was out there with him in the rain and might get wet (Schatzman, Worsley, and Fenwick 1988).

This kind of interference is amusing, but there are dreams of confusion that are not. The most common and distinct are called false awakenings. You dream of waking up but in fact, of course, are still asleep. Van Eeden (1913) called these "wrong waking up" and described them as "demoniacal, uncanny, and very vivid and bright, with . . . a strong diabolical light." The French zoologist Yves Delage, writing in 1919, described how he had heard a knock at his door and a friend calling for his help. He jumped out of bed, went to wash quickly with cold water, and when that woke him up he realized he had been dreaming. The sequence repeated four times before he finally actually woke up—still in bed.

A student of mine described her infuriating recurrent dream of getting up, cleaning her teeth, getting dressed, and then cycling all the way to the medical school at the top of a long hill, where she finally would realize that she had dreamed it all, was late for lectures, and would have to do it all over again for real.

The one positive benefit of false awakenings is that they can sometimes be used to induce out-of-body experiences (OBEs). Indeed, Oliver Fox (1962) recommends this as a method for achieving the OBE. For many people OBEs and lucid dreams are practically indistinguishable. If you dream of leaving your body, the experience is much the same. Also recent research suggests that the same people tend to have both lucid dreams and OBEs (Blackmore 1988; Irwin 1988).

All of these experiences have something in common. In all of them the "real" world has been replaced by some kind of imaginary replica. Celia Green, of the Institute of Psychophysical Research at Oxford, refers to all such states as "metachoric experiences."

Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist from the University of Alberta, Canada, relates these experiences to UFO abduction stories and near-death experiences (NDEs). The UFO abductions are the most bizarre but are similar in that they too involve the replacement of the perceived world by a hallucinatory replica.

There is an important difference between lucid dreams and these other states. In the lucid dream one has insight into the state (in fact that defines it). In false awakening, one does not (again by definition). In typical OBEs, people think they have really left their bodies. In UFO "abductions" they believe the little green men are "really there"; and in NDEs, they are convinced they are rushing down a real tunnel toward a real light and into the next world. It is only in the lucid dream that one realizes it is a dream.

I have often wondered whether insight into these other experiences is possible and what the consequences might be. So far I don’t have any answers.

Waking Up

The oddest thing about lucid dreams— and, to many people who have them, the most compelling—is how it feels when you wake up. Upon waking up from a normal dream, you usually think, "Oh, that was only a dream." Waking up from a lucid dream is more continuous. It feels more real, it feels as though you were conscious in the dream. Why is this? I think the reason can be found by looking at the mental models the brain constructs in waking, in ordinary dreaming, and in lucid dreams.

I have previously argued that what seems real is the most stable mental model in the system at any time. In waking life, this is almost always the input-driven model, the one that is built up from the sensory input. It is firmly linked to the body image to make a stable model of "me, here, now." It is easy to decide that this represents "reality" while all the other models being used at the same time are "just imagination" (Blackmore 1988).

Now consider an ordinary dream. In that case there are lots of models being built but no input-driven model. In addition there is no adequate selfmodel or body image. There is just not enough access to memory to construct it. This means, if my hypothesis is right, that whatever model is most stable at any time will seem real. But there is no recognizable self to whom it seems real. There will just be a series of competing models coming and going. Is this what dreaming feels like?

Finally, we know from research that in the lucid dream there is higher arousal. Perhaps this is sufficient to construct a better model of self. It is one that includes such important facts as that you have gone to sleep, that you intended to signal with your eyes, and so on. It is also more similar to the normal waking self than those fleeting constructions of the ordinary dream. This, I suggest, is what makes the dream seem more real on waking up. Because the you who remembers the dream is more similar to the you in the dream. Indeed, because there was a better model of you, you were more conscious.

If this is right, it means that lucid dreams are potentially even more interesting than we thought. As well as providing insight into the nature of sleep and dreams, they may give clues to the nature of consciousness itself.

Video Gamers Can Control Dreams, Study Suggests

Playing video games before bedtime may give people an unusual level of awareness and control in their sweet dreams, LiveScience has learned.

That ability to shape the alternate reality of dream worlds might not match mind-bending Hollywood films such as "The Matrix," but it could provide an edge when fighting nightmares or even mental trauma.

Dreams and video games both represent alternate realities, according to Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada. But she pointed out that dreams arise biologically from the human mind, while video games are technologically driven by computers and gaming consoles.

"If you're spending hours a day in a virtual reality, if nothing else it's practice," said Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada. "Gamers are used to controlling their game environments, so that can translate into dreams."

Gackenbach first became interested in video games in the 1990s, when she watched her son repeatedly kiss a new Nintendo gaming console on the way home from a Toys "R" Us. She had previously focused on studying lucid dreams, in which people have awareness of being in a dream.

The last decade of game-related research has since yielded several surprises, although the findings represent suggestive associations rather than definitive proof, Gackenbach cautioned. She is scheduled to discuss her work as a featured speaker at the Sixth Annual Games for Health Conference in Boston this week.

What dreams may come

Several intriguing parallels between lucid dreams and video games first emerged when Gackenbach examined past research on games. Both lucid dreamers and gamers seemed to have better spatial skills and were less prone to motion sickness.

The two groups have also demonstrated a high level of focus or concentration, whether honed through lucidity-training activities, such as meditation, or through hours spent fighting virtual enemies to reach the next level in a game.

That encouraged Gackenbach to survey the dreams of both non-gamers and hardcore gamers, beginning with two studies published in 2006. She had prepared by conducting larger surveys in-class and online to get a sense of where to focus questions.

The first study suggested that people who frequently played video games were more likely to report sweet dreams, observer dreams where they viewed themselves from outside their bodies, and dream control that allowed people to actively influence or change their dream worlds – qualities suggestive of watching or controlling the action of a video-game character.

A second study tried to narrow down the uncertainties by examining dreams that participants experienced from the night before, and focused more on gamers. It found that lucid dreams were common, but that the gamers never had dream control over anything beyond their dream selves.

The gamers also frequently flipped between a first person view from within the body and a third person view of themselves from outside, except never with the calm detachment of a distant witness.

"The first time we simply asked people how often they had lucid dreams, looking back over their life and making judgment calls," Gackenbach told LiveScience. "That's open to all kinds of bias, [such as] certain memory biases, self-reported biases."

Gackenbach eventually replicated her findings about lucid dreaming and video games several times with college students as subjects, and refined her methods by controlling for factors such as frequency of recalling dreams.

Mastering the nightmare world

Finding awareness and some level of control in gamer dreams was one thing. But Gackenbach also wondered if video games affected nightmares, based on the "threat simulation" theory proposed by Finnish psychologist Antti Revonsuo.

Revonsuo suggested that dreams might mimic threatening situations from real life, except in the safe environment of dream world. Such nightmares would help organisms hone their avoidance skills in a protective environment, and ideally prepare organisms for a real-life situation.

To test that theory, Gackenbach conducted a 2008 study with 35 males and 63 females, and used independent assessments that coded threat levels in after-dream reports. She found that gamers experienced less or even reversed threat simulation (in which the dreamer became the threatening presence), with fewer aggression dreams overall.

In other words, a scary nightmare scenario turned into something "fun" for a gamer.

"What happens with gamers is that something inexplicable happens," Gackenbach explained. "They don't run away, they turn and fight back. They're more aggressive than the norms."

Levels of aggression in gamer dreams also included hyper-violence not unlike that of an R-rated movie, as opposed to a non-gamer PG-13 dream.

"If you look at the actual overall amount of aggression, gamers have less aggression in dreams," Gackenbach said. "But when they're aggressive, oh boy, they go off the top."

No fear

The gamer dream experience of high aggression levels matched with little or no fear inspired Gackenbach to pursue a new study with Athabasca University in Canada. If gaming can act as a semi-protective function against nightmares, she reasoned, maybe it could help war veterans who experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after enduring combat.

"I don't think anyone has looked at whether there's been a protective function," Gackenbach said. "It makes a lot of sense, but it's a hypothesis."

Psychologists consider nightmares as one of the symptoms of PTSD, and studies have shown incredibly high rates of nightmares ranging from 71 to 96 percent among PTSD patients. By contrast, just 3 to 5 percent of civilians reported the same levels of nightmares.

Virtual reality simulators have already been used to help PTSD patients gradually adjust to the threatening situations that plague their waking and sleeping thoughts. If Gackenbach's hunch is correct, perhaps video games could also help relieve the need for nightmares.

Finding the balance

Gackenbach hopes to someday get a sleep lab and perhaps a virtual reality lab to verify her results, even if studies about video games and dreams have not proven the highest priority for receiving funds. Yet studying video games has attracted more interest and respect from colleagues than studying just dreams alone, she has noticed.

Some of Gackenbach's latest work includes studying the violence levels in games, based upon the video game ratings given out by the Entertainment Software Rating Board, and seeing what effect they have upon aggression within dreams.

Can Our Dreams Predict the Future?

Question: I've had dreams that came true. Example: I ride a motorcycle. I dreamt that I saw a sign that said 10 mph curve. Two weeks later I went through that curve I dreamt about. The reason the dream is important to me is because I was riding too fast to make the curve. I remembered the sign before the curve and did a hard braking job and just made the turn. It took me 30 minutes to recover from the experience. I don't always have dreams that are like that one, but I do have dreams that come true. My question is "What does dreaming have to do with what we are doing at any point in time?"

Trying to determine which dreams are about the future and which ones are not can make you pull your hair out in frustration! Stanley Krippner, who devoted much of his carrier to paranormal dreams wrote a book about it aptly called Song Of The Siren.

He feels that there is a great potential in the dream and psychic ability, but also finds the search quite elusive. His teacher and co-researcher for over a decade, Montague Ullman, agrees and his book Dream Telepathy is well worth reading for anyone interested.

Carl Jung was also interested in psi phenomena but came to a different conclusion about dreams that speaks to your question about what dreaming is doing at any point in time. He felt that dreams predict the future in a more general sense -- warning us when an attitude has gotten too far out of hand.

Thus the dream will play out variations of what will happen if the attitude is not changed. That a particular occurrence or event happens is more the natural outcome of the attitude at play rather than a seeing into the future in the sense we normally call precognitive.

This seems to fit with newer theories about dreams being a place of rehearsal. In a sense, we are rehearsing the future and some of these plays are going to be accurate.

To test yourself, Linda Magallon suggests we create a dream journal and be very careful about dating each dream. This way when something does occur, we can go back and have an objective record, at least for ourselves.

Are Dream Symbols Archetypical or Personal?

Question: Any suggestions on determining if dream symbols are Archetypical or personal? (I have some knowledge of Jungian thought.)

For example:
A dream about a monkey or a bear may come from the collective in that the symbol is universal and archetypical. On the other hand it may relate personally to a bear or a monkey I saw on TV or at the zoo.

An excellent and complex question which goes to the heart of Jung's contribution to our culture. I will briefly touch upon my opinions here, and then offer some resource for further investigation.

Generally speaking, all images are both personal *and* archetypal, at the same time. If we talk about how the bear image unfolds one's personal history and meaning, we are focusing on the personal. If we talk about how the bear transforms our consciousness and that of culture or humankind, we are at the archetypal level. But just because archetypal patterns can be found doesn't mean the image is archetypal for just a dreamer.

The key question to differentiating personal from archetypal sweet dream imagery is the *experience*: Is the experience of the image numinous, i.e. full of awe, wonder, and sense of the Wholly Other? In studying archetypes we often do so by reading about them, and thus get the intellectual or abstract aspects of how they universally unfold, how they structurally pattern behavior and how they are related to one another in the process of Individuation.

In popular culture we say so often, "Oh, it was so archetypal!" meaning that it was humorously filled with all the expected trappings. It is true that we can be "possessed" by an archetype and act them out unconsciously.

But make no mistake, archetypal encounters as Jung speaks of them are overwhelming, life-transforming, often horrible and always unexpected. If we are prepared and ready to fully change our lives they can be wonderful and miraculous, but how often are we so prepared?

Cultural pattern sweet dreams, or "Big Dreams" are said to be archetypal because they effect not just the individual, but the whole culture. As we have little respect or regard for these or any other kind of dreams in our culture, we no longer hear about them and generally don't recognize them.

If we talk about the personal in terms of "personal complexes" Jung said that the archetypes express themselves *through* the complexes. In other words, it is at those spots were we have troubles and issues that we unconsciously act out an archetypal role, where we are possessed by something non-personal and only later regret our actions. In this sense, the personal and the archetypal will be mixed.

The dream bear image can be both the bear of my family dynamics as well as the Great Bear, and with both negative and positive aspects in play. To the degree we ignore the dream bear, we act it out. To the degree we explore the dream bear, we differentiate ourselves from the image and at the same time approach the positive side of the Archetypal Bear (Polar Bear? ho, ho!).

With dreams there is an added complication. There is a barrier between the waking and dreaming environment. It is so strong that some people never recall dreams. Others, especially those that Ernest Hartmann refers to as thin-boundary people, have continual nightmares.

Are we having more archetypal dreams than we know? The bear that now seems rather tame at the breakfast table nearly scared me to death in my dream. But unless that powerful part of the experience is retained (or more accurately, retains me) it would be more appropriate to say that I had a *potentially* archetypal encounter, or my dreaming self had an archetypal encounter.

The focus for Jung is not on whether one had or didn't have an archetypal encounter, but rather what one does with that encounter. Were we ready for the encounter to significantly change our life or do we need development in one of our personality functions first?

I should mention here that these questions of how to take the dream image (as personal or archetypal) are within the whole philosophy and practice of Jungian Analysis. Just how much of this is applicable outside the analytically relationship is questionable, though Jung is popular among people interested in self awareness and growth without therapists.

Within the analysis, there is said to be a general pattern of when and how to relate to dream imagery. At first, the Shadow and personal ego issues are addressed. Then the Anima/Animus archetypes are addressed, and finally the way it all comes together through the Self in the process of individuation. But age, transference, life conditions and other factors also determine the approach to dream imagery.

In summary, it is the intensity of experience of the dreamer that determines the difference between personal and archetypal imagery. It may be a more sophisticated position to see the personal and archetypal as a spectrum.

George Devereux, a psychologist who studied Native Americans & their dreams in the 1950's revealed two cultural levels in dream symbols that stand between the personal and archetypal. The first was the traditional culture, and all the meanings that culture gave to dream symbols. Horse dream, wolf dream, etc. The next was the newer culture's images, such as the replacement of horses by cars. And so the dream bear may *appear* to look like the Alaskan Brown Bear I saw on the T.V. last night, but may be operating at several levels in my dream.

At which level should the dreamer take the dream image that seems to have both personal and archetypal elements? The final decision for this rests with you, the dreamer. If you are in therapy, discuss this with your therapist. My suggestion is to ask the question of the dreaming self. Write the question down before going to bed (What is a better path for me, to take the dream bear as personal or archetypal? or I'm going to take this symbol as personal, where will that lead me?) and view the next dream you recall as the answer.

Sweet Dreaming & Dream Consciousness

Although science has proven that we all dream every night, many people often remember no dreams at all, and even when they do, it is almost exclusively upon awakening, after the fact.

Sweet dreams are uniquely different. One realizes that one is dreaming while the dream is still happening. The scene often suddenly expands in richness and color as the dreamer becomes aware that the world being experienced, although appearing very believable, is actually a dream and that his or her physical body is elsewhere safe asleep in bed. With this new understanding, the sweet dreamer is free to explore remarkable worlds limited only by imagination, and now not just as an actor, but also to some degree as a producer and director.

Sweet dreaming was brought into the academic and public spotlights around the world once it's scientific validity was separately proven by researchers at Stanford University, California (where it has also been proven to be a learnable skill), and at Liverpool University, England. Proof was achieved by performing, during REM sleep, a series of extreme left-right eye signals which were agreed upon prior to sleep. Though most of the body's muscles are de-activated during REM sleep, the eye muscles are not, and repeated experiments at Stanford, the Sacré-Coeur Hospital Dream and Nightmare Laboratory and elsewhere have proven that the eyes (and to some extent other physiological responses) can be brought under conscious control by a dreamer who realizes that she or he is dreaming.

All of a sudden I can recall dreams... why?

Question: I very seldom have dream recall. My brother has been in a non responsive coma since July 2nd. I have had no dreams that I recall until 2 weeks before Xmas. Now I've had three that I recall. All having to do with him walking normally, or singing -- got any ideas about why I should suddenly be recalling these now?

It is very difficult to feel helpless, and even more frightening and frustrating when those we love have problems beyond our control. Though I wish that dreams could tell us about future outcomes in these matters, this path is very tricky and elusive. While only the dreamer can be the final authority on the meaning of his or her dream, we can talk about meanings in general.

If this were my dream.... In my dream there are themes of hope and recovery. It's not clear to me if this is something attached to future reality or giving me hope in the present, but it calls me to focus on the relationship I had with my brother, the everyday aspects of walking and singing, of generally being together. I might even look up friends of my brother, extending the metaphor of finding ways of being with him.