Most of what we now know about dreams was discovered by researchers, often graduate students, working at colleges and universities. You may be able to design your own study program and do original research that could others unravel the secrets of dreaming.

Whether your interest is more in counseling or in research, you may want to take a look at some of the available online degree programs in psychology. There are also degrees in counseling that prepare you to work directly with individuals or groups to help them better understand their dreams.

You probably qualify for free grants or government-guaranteed student loans. To find out, check the Federal Student Aid College Finder at

http://studentaid2.ed.gov/gotocollege/collegefinder/advanced_find.asp

Then come back here and share the news when your dream comes true.

Ask about any person who’s either a teenager or a 20 something year old what the ultimate romance book and film are and I’ll bet that they’ll say The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks. I remember going and seeing it with two of my best friends and it seemed like everyone in the theater was crying their eyes out, including us.

But even after all this time, I’ve never read the book by Nicholas Sparks that the movie was based off of. While I was looking for a discounted copy online, I saw the site clearwirewimax4g.com and decided to change over my internet service at my house to it.

I finally found a really cheap copy on Amazon and bought my very own copy of The Notebook. I went through it pretty fast because I just could not put it down! I liked it as much as the movie, even though I didn’t have gorgeous Ryan Gosling to look at as the lead guy. After that, I had to watch the movie again. It was only appropriate.

Like Freud, Jung believed in the existence of the unconscious. However, he didn’t see the unconscious as animalistic, instinctual, and sexual; he saw it as more spiritual. Dreams were a way of communicating and acquainting ourselves with the unconscious.

To Jung, dreams were not attempts to conceal our true feelings from the waking mind; they were a window to our unconscious.
They served to guide the waking self to achieve wholeness. 

To Jung, dreams offered a solution to a problem we are facing in our waking life. Jung viewed the ego as one’s sense of self and how we portray ourselves to the world. 

Part of Jung’s theory was that all things can be viewed as paired opposites (i.e. good/evil, male/female, or love/hate). And thus working in opposition to the ego, is the “counter-ego” or what he referred to as the shadow.

The shadow represents rejected aspects of yourself that you do not wish to acknowledge. It is considered an aspect of yourself which is somewhat more primitive, uncultured, and awkward.

Jung said, “Dreams are the main source of all of our knowledge about symbolism.” He meant that the messages you receive from your dreams are expressed symbolically and must be interpreted to find their true meanings.

In his writings, Jung says that rarely do the symbols in dreams have just one meaning. And when interpreting the messages in your dreams, he suggests going with your first hunch, relying on your intuitive abilities, before applying more rational methods of dream interpretation.

Image via Wikipedia

Children are especially likely to have nightmares. In fact, nightmares are common in children. Nightmares typically start at around age 3 years old and continue till about age 7 or 8.

People with anxiety disorder might also experience what experts call night terrors. These are actually panic attacks that occur in sleep. It is especially difficult to remember these types of dreams since they conjure up terrifying images that we would just as soon forget.

In poetic myth, the Night Mare is a “small nettlesome mare, not more than thirteen hands high, of the breed familiar with the Elgin marbles: cream-colored, clean-limbed, with a long head, bluish eye, flowing mane and tail.”

Mares’ nests, “when one comes across them in dreams, lodged in rock-clefts or the branches of enormous hollow yews, are built of carefully chosen twigs lined with white horse-hair and the plumage of prophetic birds and littered with the jaw-bones and entrails of poets.” Thus, in a pagan world of myth and blood sacrifice, the Nightmare was a cruel, fearful creature.

Our modern word nightmare derives from the Middle English nihtmare (from niht, night, and mare, demon), an evil spirit believed to haunt and suffocate sleeping people. And so, in today’s world, when we speak of a nightmare we mean a frightening dream accompanied by a sensation of oppression and helplessness.

The blood-thirsty aspect of the mythic Nightmare, provides a clue about nightmares in general. In psychodynamic terms nightmares are graphic portrayals of raw, primitive emotions such as aggression and rage that have not been incorporated into the conscious psyche. Thus we tend to encounter these “ugly” aspects of our unconscious lives as terrifying dream images in whose presence we feel completely helpless.

Nightmares are quite common in childhood because this is a time of our emotional development when we all have to come to terms with, well, raw, primitive emotions such as aggression and rage. Traumatic nightmares can also occur as one of the many symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Repetitive, intrusive nightmares following a trauma often contain symbolic themes that mirror the original trauma and relate to threat to life, threat of abandonment or death, or loss of identity. Therefore, traumatic nightmares need to be treated differently than other dreams.

It is not enough to know intellectually the psychological reasons why you have these nightmares. An event is traumatic because it disrupts your previously secure—and illusory—sense of “self.” And so, to heal from a trauma, you must take the initiative to make conscious changes in your life to accommodate the traumatic shattering of your illusions about life and identity.

Some believe that nightmares have a physiological aspect. Edgar Cayce believed that Nightmares, which bring with them an inability to move or cry out, usually indicate the wrong diet. To end the nightmarish dreams, he advised that you change your diet.

We found a technique on line that can help people who suffer from recurrent nightmares. It is not meant to be a cure-all. It is just a suggested treatment to deal with frightening nightmares. The idea is to use this therapy every night until the nightmare has been resolved. It is called Imagery Rehearsal Therapy.

Here are the steps of Imagery Rehearsal Therapy:

1. Write out the text of the nightmare. Tell the story, no matter how frightening, in as much detail as you can remember.

2. Create a new ending for the nightmare and write it down. Be careful, though, to make the new ending peaceful. Remember that the nightmare is grounded in emotions such as raw anger that have been provoked by a trauma. The point of a new ending is to “tame” the emotions, not merely vent them in violence and revenge.

3. Rehearse the new version of the story in your imagination each night just before going to sleep. Do that as close as possible to falling asleep without any other activity between the rehearsal and sleep.

4. Do a relaxation exercise. Do this immediately after the rehearsal, as a way to fall asleep peacefully. You may use any technique with which you are familiar. This could be meditation, yoga, or breathing exercises. The “cousin” of nightmares is disturbing dreams with unpleasant images.

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As in many of his theories, Freud associated dreams with sex. Fundamental to his view of dreams was the belief that the purpose of dreams is to allow us to satisfy in our fantasies the instinctual urges that society considers unacceptable, such as certain sexual practices. That was partly why he experienced such the enormous opposition and criticism from scientists and the public alike.

When Freud was young, only men were thought to have powerful sexual urges. When Freud showed that repressed but obvious sexual desires were equally at work in women this created a social uproar. Perhaps his second finding in regard to sexuality surprised even him.

During Freud’s analysis of women patients, sexual advance or assault by the woman’s father was often revealed. Freud struggled with this, wondering whether the assault was memory of an actual event, or a psychic reproduction of it. He eventually came to the conclusion that hysterical and neurotic behavior was often due to the trauma caused by an early sexual assault by the parent.

Where there was not evidence of physical assault, Freud felt that the neurosis was due to sexual conflict or a trauma caused by some other event. That conflict was often manifested through dreams. That led to his theories being rejected by university colleagues, fellow doctors, and even by patients.

The more Freud allowed his patients to go in their own direction, the more they talked about their dreams. Also, talking about the dream often enabled the patient to discover a new and productive chain of associations and memories.

Freud began to take note of his own dreams and explore the associations they aroused. In doing so he was the first person to consciously and consistently explore a dream into its depths through uncovering and following obvious and hidden associations and emotions connected with the dream imagery and drama.

Although earlier dream researchers had noticed how dream images correlated with personal concerns, Freud broke new ground, seeing the connection with sexual feelings, with early childhood trauma, and with the subtleties of the human psyche.

Freud explored his dreams to deal with his own neurosis. He wrote of that period, ‘I have been through some kind of neurotic experience, with odd states of mind not intelligible to consciousness, cloudy thoughts and veiled doubts, with barely here and there a ray of light.’

Using dreams for his self analysis, Freud found that he could remember forgotten details from his childhood along with feelings and states of mind that he had never before experienced.

Freud wrote of his period of personal dream analysis,

“Some sad secrets of life are being traced back to their first roots; the humble origins of much pride and precedence are being laid bare. I am now experiencing myself all the things that, as a third party, I have witnessed going on in my patients, days when I slink about depressed because I have understood nothing of the day’s dreams, fantasies, or mood.”

The Interpretation of Dreams, Cover via Amazon

Sigmund Freud actually called dreams the “royal road to the unconscious.” That statement will probably remain true in psychology forever.

Freud’s classic book, The Interpretation of Dreams, includes some of his finest work. Freud wrote that every dream is a wish fulfillment. He continued to believe that theory to the end, even though he gave up his initial idea that all dreams have a sexual content.

For Freud, the concept of wish fulfillment did not necessarily mean that the dream indicated that the dreamer was seeking pleasure. He said that the dreamer could just as well have a wish to be punished. Nevertheless, this idea of a “secret” wish being masked by a dream remains central to classical Freudian psychoanalysis.

Freud said,

“Dreams are not comparable to the spontaneous sounds made by a musical instrument struck rather by some external force than by the hand of a performer; they are not meaningless, not absurd, they do not imply that one portion of our stockpile of ideas sleeps while another begins to awaken. Dreams are a completely valid psychological phenomenon, specifically the fulfillment of wishes. They can be classified in the continuity of comprehensible waking mental states; they are constructed through highly complicated intellectual activity.”

After Freud noticed how allowing his patients to freely associate ideas with whatever came to mind, he began to seriously explore what he called spontaneous abreaction. Freud himself suffered bouts of deep anxiety, and it was partly this that led him to explore the connection between association of ideas and dreams.

In 1897 Freud wrote this to his friend, Wilhelm Fliess:

“No matter what I start with, I always find myself back again with the neuroses and the psychical apparatus. Inside me there is a seething ferment, and I am only waiting for the next surge forward. I have felt impelled to start writing about dreams, with which I feel on firm ground.”

All is Dream album cover. Image via Wikipedia

Facts about dreams and dreaming:

• Everybody dreams. EVERYBODY! Simply because you do not remember your dream does not mean that you did not dream.

• Dreams are indispensable. A lack of dream activity can mean protein deficiency or a personality disorder.

• Men tend to dream more about other men, while women dream equally about men and women.

• People who are giving up smoking have longer and more intense dreams.

• Toddlers do not dream about themselves. They do not appear in their own dreams until the age of 3 or 4.

• If you are snoring, then you cannot be dreaming.

• Blind people do dream. Whether visual images will appear in their dream depends on whether they where blind at birth or became blind later in life. But vision is not the only sense that constitutes a dream. Sounds, tactility, and smell become hypersensitive for the blind and their dreams are based on these senses.

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Dreaming Beyond Death: A Guide to Pre-Death Dreams and Visions is a book about the dreams that some patients have spontaneously that comfort them throughout the process of dying, and how to counsel them. It was written by the Rev. Patricia Bulkley and Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D.

Patricia Bulkley is a counsellor who works with people who are dying. Kelly Bulkeley is a dream researcher. They came together to write a down-to-earth, matter-of-fact book to help patients like Patricia’s and those who care for them.

Recently I reviewed another book on essentially the same topic, The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead, by Robert Moss, whose books I talk about a lot here. If you have read some of those reviews, you know that I love Moss’s books and his ideas.

You may also have decided that his books are probably a bit out there for materialists who have no particular belief or interest in dreams. Moss’s books are extremely readable, but they also tend to be long. While they are easy and fun to read, they are also somewhat mystical. 

Dreaming Beyond Death is a short, simple book, written for those who do not believe in dreams but do want to help others make a peaceful transition. This is a book you can give to a healthcare professional or a person with a conservative, orthodox belief system. The book does not assume that the reader believes in dreams or anything mystical. And for those who are not dream believers that is a very good thing.

This book also tells vivid stories of dreams that have brought peace and reassurance to dying people. It provides guidance for helping people understand and accept their dreams. And it does all that in a simple, readable way.

Dreaming Beyond Death is a great book to give as a gift, knowing that almost anyone can benefit from it. They do not have to believe in anything metaphysical at all. I wish I had had it to use in comforting a friend who was dying of cancer a few years ago. 

So keep it in mind. You might like to read it yourself.

And it could be a wonderful caring gift for someone who needs it. In fact, it would be a great blessing.

Here is the link: http://www.healthylife.net/RadioShow/archiveWD.htm

There is even an 800 number so that you can call in with questions during the show as he interviews other dreamworkers and dream researchers. 

What a blessing for all of us!