Posted on 10/25/2007 12:04:15 AM PDT by neverdem
The patient was a 37-year-old man who had been physically abused as a boy by his schizophrenic mother, often while he lay in bed trying to fall asleep. Nevertheless, he had grown into a reasonably normal, gainfully employed adult, and he thought that the worst was behind him, until one night he awoke to find an intruder rummaging through his dresser drawers. After that, his nightmares began — terrifying, recurrent dreams in which the intruder was a middle-age woman and a knife dangled with Damoclesian contempt from the ceiling fan over his head.
“The old fear memories had not gone away,” said Dr. Ross Levin, a psychologist and sleep researcher at Yeshiva University in New York. They “were easily reactivated by the recent trauma,” and just as readily twisted into the basis of a repetitive nightmare. Dr. Levin urged the patient to reframe the dream and rehearse alternatives to swinging blades and frozen fear, until finally the nightmares abated and the man could regain his footing.
Few of us suffer from nightmares crippling and persistent enough to demand treatment. Yet we all know how bad a nightmare feels, how it surrounds you and surges up to drown you and makes your teeth fall out in chunks and gives you leukemia and look, your 6-year-old daughter is running back and forth through traffic, and oh no, this train is headed the wrong way and it’s past midnight, and there you are a cowardly third-grader back on Creston Avenue in the Bronx, no, please, not the Bronx! And you scream and you thrash and you want to wake up.
By all evidence, outrageously bad dreams are a universal human experience. Sometimes the dreams are scary enough to jolt the slumberer awake, in which case they meet the formal definition of nightmares...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
bump
2:30 am and think I’ll go back to bed.
I have the same nightmare several times a week. I’m sitting in a bus station trying to fold a slice of cheese into an airplane when some guy taps me on the shoulder and tells me that the sun is about to burn out. I ask him what to do but he says it so softly that I can’t hear him.
I think we dream because prior inhibited responses to stimulii need to be resolved and cleaned out of the system. The brain creates a little allegory to work them out. If we dreamed about the thing itself, without allegorizing it, the inhibited desire would simply repeat itself.
My theory is similar, or perhaps identical, to yours.
I think we dream to "complete" chains of thought we interrupted while we were awake.
Some nightmares result when we pursue an unpleasant or frightening train of thought during the day, then force ourselves to think about something else because we want to avoid thinking about what we fear.
Not all dreams are physical or somatic in nature, just as some are not purely soulish in nature.
Some dreams are very spiritual.
For example, I know an elderly Russian emigre, who periodically has dreams in German, where he will read/quote aloud while asleep poems written by Goethe. BTW, he doesn’t know German, except perhaps a few phrases from Hogan’s Heros or what they learned in the war such as “hands up”, “Stop”, or Heil Hitler. Later he would pick up books in German and be able to read them, even though he had never had any education in German.
I myself have had dreams in Hebrew and Aramaic of which I never even knew the alphabet, but able to later recall and write, then search for alphabets with the same characters.
Additionally there are a category of dreams known as vivid dreams to those who recall them, in which the dreamer is receiving perceptions more vivid than normal life, including a body, heightened physical senses, cognizance of other persons, reasoning ability to construe logical arguments mentally before deciding to act, and with volition to act in the dream. I would categorize such dreams as more spiritual in nature. Interestingly enough, many of these spiritual dreams might involve persons other than the dreamer as evidenced to the dreamer by their expressing thoughts or ideas which had never dawned on the person dreaming before.
Some screenwriters in Hollywood express their relationships to their ‘muse’ or spiritual influence which gives them ideas upon which to write entire story lines.
We are told in Scripture that man was originally created in body, soul, and spirit. Each has a different system of perception. The body has the commonly understood five senses of sight, hearing, touch/feeling, smell, and taste. The soul has a system of perception such as rationalism. Faith is a system of perception involving the human spirit, which to those who have never exercised faith alone in Christ alone will not understand, because until that faith is exercised, God does not give them a living spirit.
Elements of the physical domain may indeed influence our thinking, just as rationalism or elements of the rational domain may influence the body. Likewise, spiritual elements may influence both the soul and mind and visa versa.
There is plenty of science to discern features of the physical domain by the use of rationalism and empiricism, but they fail to be able to account for the spiritual domain. This is probably the greatest fallacy in science which as a system of verification remains so woefully ignorant. This doesn’t preclude the believer form being able to work with body soul and spirit, thereby making full use of all those things made available to him, but the unbeliever who limits his thinking and decisions to science and rationalism fails to make use of a wealth of perception available to him in a reliable fashion.
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