Secrets of sleep. Dream Interpretation all the secrets of dreams are revealed All the secrets of dreams and dreams are revealed

SECRETS OF DREAMS

Why does day follow night? What is life? What is death and what is sleep? These questions probably interested the Neanderthals, who lived about 40 thousand years ago.

The man thought, compared, persistently searched and found, as it seemed to him, the answers. He watched as each new day began with the sunrise and burned out with it. Every night, falling to the ground, interrupts people's affairs and imperiously takes them to sleep.

When the sun rises, everything repeats itself again. But not for everyone. Someone doesn't wake up and dies. But what does it mean to die? What is death? And does it even exist?

After all, every night we die, and in the morning we come to life. And how many times have you seen: a man fell, lost consciousness, and after a while came to his senses.

Or it seems that a person has died, but a day passes, a second, sometimes a week or more - and life returns. Lethargic sleep has always struck people with its similarity to death. And if a person didn’t wake up, did he really die? To which of us, in a dream, and to those who suffer from hallucinations, did not relatives, loved ones, friends, those who have already left this world come forever?

And if they come, it means they live somewhere, exist. So there is no death?

The ancients believed that death is just a long, long dream, that someone constantly lives in every person. This mysterious "someone" can leave a person's body and return again. This is how the idea of ​​a double arose.

It was believed that the double was a real being, possessing not only its own body, but also an amazing property - volatility.

When the double is in the body, the person does not sleep, works, loves, suffers; the double has left the body - the person is sleeping or losing consciousness; did not return - falls asleep in eternal sleep.

Over time, the concept of a double changed: it was no longer endowed with physical properties, but was perceived as a spirit, a soul.

Some imagined the soul as a very subtle ethereal part of the body, others - in the form of a subtle substance that cannot be seen or touched, others considered it a foggy elusive creature, a shadow that has a body (though it is different from ours). The soul can drink, eat, it can be injured and even killed.

Dreams have always been indisputable evidence of the real existence of the soul.

Beliefs have come down to us from ancient times: dreams are what the soul sees after leaving the body.

At this time, she lives according to the laws, communicates with people dear to her who have died long ago, travels, feasts, solves the most difficult problems, and overcomes obstacles.

The soul continues to live after the death of a person. The man was kind during his life; a kind soul remained to live after his death; an evil, cruel, quarrelsome person died - an evil soul toils around the world.

Meeting a good soul in a dream is a good dream; meeting the soul of an evil person portends trouble.

The ancients believed that someone else's soul could pay a visit to a sleeping person, or vice versa: with your soul you could visit someone else's body.

Night dreams sometimes amaze us with their reality, and in the beliefs of peoples one can notice that sleep and reality are absolutely real for them.

Somehow, in the last century, an African dreamed that a white traveler killed his slave. The African, waking up early in the morning, immediately demanded a ransom for the damage caused, although his slave was alive and well... The ransom had to be paid: the basis for demanding a ransom was too serious - a dream.

Dreams were considered not just reality, but material reality. In China there was a custom: if a person had a bad dream, then in order to prevent the misfortune predicted in the dream, the dream can simply... be eaten! To do this, they turned to the tapir: “O tapir, eat my dream.”

The mountain stream helped the Tajiks in such situations: they asked it to take away the bad dream.

We find an echo of ideas about the materiality of dreams in proverbs and spells: “Where the night goes, there goes the dream.”

Now we already know that there is ordinary sleep, lethargic sleep, hypnotic sleep, hallucinations. But often, even with modern knowledge, our dreams amaze us with their mystery, intricacies of plot lines and, most importantly, predictability. How difficult it can sometimes be to understand these nightly dreams.

In order to unravel their dreams, these prophetic clues of fate, people have long been trying to interpret them, to find the relationship between dream images and real life phenomena. This is how dream books were created.

The first known dream book belongs to the pen of Artemidorus of Ephesus (2nd century BC).

One of the oldest monuments of world culture dates back to the beginning of the 1st millennium BC - the Indian collection of spells "Atharvaveda". The authorship of this ancient book is attributed to the fire priest Atharvan.

Among the numerous spells collected in this book, a significant number serve to break the spell cast by bad dreams.

Of course, dreams here are also perceived as reality, but a reality that can be destroyed with the help of conspiracies.

People have strived to reveal the secrets of sleep at all times, and we must give them their due - they have achieved significant success. An analysis of myths, legends, and customs convincingly testifies: many properties of sleep and a significant amount of specifics in dreams, if not comprehended or cognized, were, in any case, noticed in ancient times.

Thus, the priests of Ancient Egypt knew and were able to use hypnosis methods.

It is not for nothing that in Ancient Greece, among the numerous gods, a place of honor belonged to the god of sleep - Hypnos. Hypnos is the son of the night, and night is his kingdom. He is the brother of Moira - the goddesses of fate and the brother of death.

The similarity between sleep and death is purely external, but how often does Thanatos - the god of death - come to a person when he is in captivity of Hypnos.

The face of Thanatos is terrible; Hypnos is quiet, beautiful and benevolent.

But the wise Greeks understood: sleep is a very complex phenomenon, and it cannot be personified by one god. Therefore, Hypnos has many children - the gods of sleep and dreams.

Perhaps the most famous is the beautiful and omnipresent god of dreams, the winged Morpheus. The gods generously endowed him: he can take on any form and visit everyone living on earth in a dream.

Hypnos and Morpheus are active assistants to Asclepius, the god of healers, the god of medicine. Already in those distant times, healers learned the healing power of sleep, they believed that dreams in the temple of Asclepius were a hint from the gods about a person’s illness and advice on how to treat the patient.

Even the great doctors of the past, Hippocrates and Galen, drew attention to the diagnostic value of dreams. This problem was developed in the works of many doctors of antiquity, in the Middle Ages.

The knowledge about dreams and dreams accumulated over the past centuries is successfully used by modern medicine. Scientific research confirms the following:

Dreams, if deciphered correctly, can be used very effectively in diagnosing and predicting human diseases, because any changes in the body, joys, sorrows, shocks are reflected in night dreams.

An experienced specialist in the nature of dreams can not only determine the disease itself, but also find out the specific disease, its location, beginning, development and completion.

During the latent period of the disease, the frequency of dreams increases, both during one night and over many nights.

Dreams become unpleasant, restless, and sometimes turn into nightmares. Dream subjects at this stage: dirt, blood, fires, injuries, attacks, battles, doctors, medicines, falls, etc.

It has been noticed that the more severe the disease, the more terrible the dreams and their consequences: feelings of fear, anxiety, despondency.

Dreams sometimes directly, and sometimes in encrypted form, reflect the localization of the pathological process, the specifics of a particular disease.

As a rule, such dreams continue throughout the illness, often repeated “verbatim” or with changes. And when joyful motives appear in such dreams, their emotional coloring changes, which means the period of recovery has begun.

Knowing the general patterns of development in the manifestations of dreams, it is possible to explain most of the so-called prophetic dreams.

Thus, the dream described in 1908 by M. M. Popov made an indelible impression on many. The young brilliant officer Prince Vasily Vladimirovich Dolgoruky suddenly died. The death of the prince deeply affected his friend Stepan Stepanovich Apraksin.

On the first night after the tragedy, he had a dream: his deceased friend came to visit him. Friends know that they are already in different worlds, but this does not bother them. The deceased prince promises his friend a long life and says that the next time he will visit him three days before his death.

Forty years have passed. And again Stepan Stepanovich saw his friend in a dream. Three days later he died...

At first glance, it seems that there was some intervention from higher powers. But psychologists say that the forces of suggestion and self-hypnosis played a role here. Science has known such phenomena for a long time.

As we see, both sleep and dreams still contain many mysteries and secrets. In fact, we know little about simple things like snoring and yawning.

It is also incomprehensible that a disease such as the “Curse of Ondine” takes away the lives of infants during sleep who had not previously suffered from anything (the unusual name of the disease is taken from mythology: jealous gods deprived the mortal lover of a water nymph of the opportunity to breathe in his sleep).

They still cannot figure out why, in their sleep, practically healthy men suddenly experience fibrillation of the heart muscle, and then death.

The so-called “enlightened” dreams, which not only develop “to order”, but also allow interference and influence on the consciousness of a sleeping person, are also incomprehensible.

The “sense of pre-existence”, first described by Walter Scott and named by him, has also not been studied: a person sees images that really exist, but have never been seen by him - a certain area, a house, a room, etc.

Sleep hides many secrets in ghostly night dreams.

It seems that sleep and dreams can serve as the key that nature gave to man to understand the fundamental secrets of existence: consciousness, thinking, memory.

And now a few words about hallucinations - the so-called “waking dream”.

Hallucinations are a state of daydreaming; at a time when the senses are awakened, the eyes see, the ears hear, etc. Strictly speaking, this is nothing more than the delirium of one of many senses, since the imagined object has no effect on the retina of the eye, the sound does not strike hearing, then the real cause of hallucination must be sought in the sensory nervous system and attributed to the special activity of the brain.

This phenomenon does not exist only for sight and hearing; other senses can also be affected by it. Touch, smell, taste, felt without any external irritation, can also be called true hallucinations.

With such a misconception of the senses, one hears, for example, delightful melodies, while another hears a terrible noise, a creaking tearing apart the ears. One sees charming images, another sees disgusting, horrifying faces, etc. Finally, some imagine that they are being beaten or tortured, that they are gnawing on hot coals, while others think that they are eating expensive foods and drinking excellent wines .

These imaginary sensations depend on ideas and images represented by memory, supplemented and personified by habit. Books of such content, the history of magic and sorcery in all times and among all peoples, the annals of psychological medicine are filled with many examples of as many amazing, as many strange delusions of feelings.

The reasons predisposing to such a state are of two kinds: physical and moral. The first are very numerous: an increase or decrease in temperature, abuse of alcoholic beverages, strong intake of quinine sulfate, foxglove grass, mad cherry, henbane, dope, opium acapita, camphor, nitrogen fumes and especially hashish; finally, shocks to the brain from a blow, a fall, etc. Ordinary physical causes also include: a sudden impression on the senses or a too long and vivid sensation, too intense attention, remorse, fear, fright, passions, etc.

Although these delusions can occur at all hours of the day, for the most part they develop before sleep or immediately after waking up, when all objects take on some indefinite form: this moment is the most favorable, and the slightest external excitement can disrupt it.

It should be noted here that in most cases the errors of the senses are discovered at the onset of madness, and as soon as this disease breaks out, they take on a long-lasting character and ceaselessly haunt their unfortunate victim.

In other cases, hallucinations appear in full consciousness; sometimes they become intermittent and occur daily at certain hours. We encounter this phenomenon mainly in hysterical, cataleptic, hypochondriacal, melancholic and such individuals who indulge in deep thoughts or sad passions.

Let us now take a look at the misconceptions inherent in each sense separately, and begin with the misconceptions of hearing, as the most common.

1. Hearing misconceptions. Individuals belonging to this category seem to hear various kinds of sounds, quiet, loud or terrible voices that affect one or both ears, come from afar or nearby, and sometimes are internal. Those affected by this condition hear noise in the head, chest and other parts of the body. History tells of many great people who listened to the voice of their guardian genius. These inner voices were nothing more than a concussion of the brain nerves excited by continuous mental activity.

I knew one professor of philosophy, a hot-tempered and indomitable man, who in his young years indulged in bad inclinations, which were suppressed by the efforts of his mind. This professor heard different voices: one, meek and friendly, attracted him to goodness; the other, responding with a metallic sound and a rude tone, encouraged him to evil. Here the explanation is very natural: the mind fought with instinct and won the victory in this fight.

One gunner, who had been deaf for ten years, suddenly began to hear the sounds of trumpets and military music, reminding him of those days when he was under the colors. He happily told his friends that he would soon be cured of deafness, because he was beginning to hear the sounds of a trumpet and the beat of a bass drum.

In Bicetri, several years ago, there was a poor musician who, as a result of insanity, became a lycanthrope (believing himself to be a wolf); of those present in this institution, he did not want to make acquaintances with anyone, except for one medical student who gave him a bow.

Every day, in solitude, he spent hours moving the bow along his left hand, as if on a violin. At the same time, his pantomimes were very curious: he made movements now forward, now back, now to the right, now to the left, now speeding up, now slowing down the beat and signaling to the imaginary orchestra to perform the piece better; then his movements intensified and his face became covered with a large sweat, expressing annoyance that the invisible musicians were not playing as they should.

A minute later he slowly moved the bow along his hand, looked at the sky and seemed to listen to the delightful harmony, inexplicable delight was expressed in his features, and if at that moment anyone interfered with him, “Shh! Shh!” he shouted, “on your knees.” , profane! listen to these divine sounds! "

In the last years of his life, the famous Beethoven went completely deaf and listened as an invisible orchestra played his sublime symphonies. They say that for the old man this was the first consolation.

One lady, who fully possessed her mental abilities, as soon as she sat down at the toilet, heard two male voices. One extolled the whiteness of her skin, the elasticity of her form and her secret charms. “You are so beautiful that you can go crazy with love for you!” - he said. And the lady, although she was very pleased to hear such praise, closed herself off from shyness.

When she again approached the mirror to continue her interrupted toilette, suddenly another voice was heard, saying something completely opposite to the first: “Your freshness is fake, these shapes and circles are only a deception: if only those who are surprised by them would look at them naked, they would run away, frightened by your ugliness. You are so disgusting that it’s even scary to look at you!”

The poor lady blushed with shame and turned pale with annoyance, and loudly called the servant to push him out of the insolent man. But as the servant entered, she realized her mistake and ordered him to put the horses into the carriage. The next day at a certain hour the same thing was repeated; So six months passed.

Now this lady is completely cured and can attend to her toilet without any hindrance.

One abbot, whose mental abilities were below mediocrity, suddenly awoke one day as an eloquent preacher, everyone flocked to listen to him. The surprised boss asked him the reason for such an unexpected change. The abbot simply answered him that in the silence of the night he heard divine voices and wrote his sermons under the dictation of St. Mikhail.

2. Misconceptions of vision. The errors of this sense, like the errors of hearing, are almost always in more or less close connection with real ideas and activities or with past living sensations. The images that appear are either clear and sharply outlined, or dark and confusing; they last longer or shorter, then fade, seem as if disintegrating in the air and disappear.

We have already said that visual errors also occur during the day, but more often in the morning, evening and night. If they awaken on a dark night, then one ray of light instantly scatters them; on a clear day, just blinking is enough to make them disappear.

Mr. Baillarger, in his excellent essay on the fallacy of the senses, reports the following fact: in 1832, during excavations in the old Franciscan monastery in Paris, many coffins were discovered, inside of which there were still fairly well-preserved skeletons. One medical student received from the workers a fair amount of bones, which he hung on the walls of his room, and two days later, returning home at midnight, he felt fear at the sight of the disgusting skulls illuminated by the moonlight. He drove away this stupid fear, lit a cigar, drank a glass of rum and went to bed.

He had just fallen asleep when he was awakened by severe pain in his elbow, mixed with the noise of voices and groans. Looking around in fear, he saw in the light of the moon two rows of human figures who were dressed in shrouds and walked around the room in silent meditation.

“Their motionless faces,” he said, “shone like silver, their gazes fixed on me cast pale lightning. From time to time they glanced at me, wrinkled eyebrows, and their whispers denounced hostile attempts on my person.

At first I thought that I was undergoing a terrible nightmare, but I was completely awake, because I heard the sound of a carriage in the street and the striking of the clock in the bell tower of St. Severina. I felt all the slightest details of the vision, I wanted to jump out of bed, but it was as if I was being held back.

Raising my head, I noticed next to me a tall man in black clothes, with a pale face. His sparkling eyes forced me to close my eyelids; since my hand was as if in pincers and I could not jump out of bed, I felt rage, despair, and fear. Finally, the giant let go of my hand, turning to me with some kind of speech, from which I retained only these words: curiosity, immodesty, youth.

Now I jumped out of bed and opened the window, I really wanted to jump into the yard... Meanwhile, the coolness of the night again reminded me of real life, and I looked for a long time at the starry sky, illuminated by the silver rays of the moon. When I turned to look at my bed, I again saw a man dressed in black and two rows of white ghosts.

I looked at the strange scene for at least a quarter of an hour. It began to dawn. There was a lot of movement between these figures; I heard the doors of my room opening and closing; I went back to bed; my eyes were covered with a veil, and a sound sleep took possession of me. Waking up at eight o’clock, I felt severe pain in the crook of my palm and an incomprehensible melancholy, as if I had gotten rid of some terrible danger.”

An official of the War Department was for a long time subjected to a painful delusion of feelings. Waking up in the morning, he saw a spider hanging on a web in the middle of his room. The spider quickly grew in size and filled the entire room, so that the official reluctantly went out so that this gigantic and disgusting insect would not crush him.

Now this deceptive idea was replaced by another, less painful and more pleasant. Every morning, when the official woke up, he saw a table with an excellent breakfast, but, unfortunately, he can only enjoy the views, because the table disappears the very minute the official approaches him.

During my stay in Greece, I experienced a very pleasant delusion of feelings, which I attribute to mental stress, and during which my vision and hearing were strained at the same time.

On one of the beautiful and poetic evenings under the blue sky of Hellas, I lay down to rest on the green carpet of Mount Lyceum. High peaks rose in the misty distance, and the silver waves of the Gulf of Arcadia were reflected on the azure horizon, birds sang under the shadow of spring leaves, a light breeze carried the fragrance of herbs and flowers through the small valley, and the last rays of the setting sun cast their mysterious shades on this beautiful nature.

I was young, impressionable, full of enthusiasm and sweet memories, little by little transported in my mind to the heroic times of ancient Greece.

My eyes quietly turned to the banks of the Ladon River, which flowed at my feet. Corporeal life seemed to cease, and my imagination wandered through the laughing fields of mythology.

In the midst of this silent contemplation, I saw, at some distance from me, a choir of nymphs dancing to the sound of Pan’s pipe. They intertwined their arms, their feet struck the ground in rhythmic rhythm, and as soon as the breeze lifted their light tunics, my eyes admired their charming forms and luxurious outlines.

It was a sweet deception of the senses!.. Oh! How I would like to continue it!.. But, ah, just one narrowing of the eye was enough to destroy everything, scatter everything...

I could explain this phenomenon to myself as long as it concerned only the sense of vision, but what I heard remained inexplicable to me. I went down to the river bank to see a musician, whose monotonous melodies were carried to me by the wind.

After several searches, I noticed that in some places on the bank the reeds were cut to an uneven height, so that the air rushing over the open pipes produced various sounds from them, which, mixing with the noise of the leaves, produced a strange harmony that I heard. This explained everything.

3. Misconceptions of touch. When the sense of touch is lost, the subject experiences imaginary crawling of ants on his skin, general or local stabbing, a sensation of cold and warmth, varying from icy cold to burning pain, the touch of some reptile entwined around his body, a spider crawling on him; sometimes it seems to him that his body is increasing in volume, swelling enormously and finally bursting, but sometimes it gradually decreases and reaches the size of a grain of sand.

In other circumstances, he imagines that he is being hit with a stick, a whip, etc. More pleasant delusions make him think about caresses and hugs, then he considers himself happy and inexplicable pleasure is expressed in his features.

One poor woman felt like mice were running all over her body. As soon as she managed to free herself from them, she was attacked by spiders, which soon turned into beetles. An hour later this vision disappeared, and she calmed down until the next day.

Another woman felt as if her body was covered with toads and caterpillars. The third, after she once had to drink water from a stream, felt that a frog was moving in her stomach. The fourth felt hot and was covered in sweat in winter. The fifth thought she was cold and shivered on the hottest summer afternoon.

One notary allowed his wife to beat him; his wife died, and he was glad that now he would be left alone, but, ah! His hope was in vain. The body of the evil wife appeared from time to time and counted out several full blows to him with a stick, so that the poor fellow, in the middle of his studies, screamed loudly, as if he was really being beaten.

A story is told about a poor lady from Pant who was troubled for a long time by a demon who knew neither the slightest decency nor shame. This assistant of Satan appeared to her in a dream in the form of a beautiful young man and communicated with her even on the marriage bed, next to her husband. The unfortunate woman, despite the solemn words of the spellcasters, would have fallen into complete exhaustion, into which lustful pleasures plunged her during the night, if the art of medicine had not come to her aid and driven away the annoying demon, restoring her health.

4. Misconceptions of smell and taste. Misconceptions of this kind are much less common than the previous ones, but quite a lot of examples are still found that serve as confirmation of their existence.

Enthusiastic hypocrites imagine that they are surrounded by the smell of myrrh, incense, cinnamon and incense, on the contrary, the raging ones hear a fetid and disgusting smell everywhere.

One doctor, wanting to test how far a delusion of this kind could extend, brought one blindfolded to the slaughterhouse, he stayed for a whole hour and imagined that he was walking through a garden planted with fragrant flowers.

One old actress, who had gone mad, imagined herself a victim of a crowd of lovers whom she rejected in the days of her triumph. “It’s not enough that they insult me,” she said, “no, they throw such fetid uncleanness on my body that I have no peace day or night.”

5. Delusion of all senses together. Such cases are very rare and occur only among madmen or fanatics.

One girl of weak build, nervous, hysterical and frightened by the speeches and teachings of a fanatic, little by little came to a state that was not yet madness, but over time would have led to madness if love for her father and the requests of her brother had not returned her to the true path. We present her own story here.

“I spent my days in prayer, and as a result of prolonged prayers I heard heavenly sounds, divine harmonies. A sweet voice resounded in my ears and promised me eternal bliss if I became a nun, but I did not have enough spirit to leave my father, 75- a year-old elder, for whom I was his only consolation, and so I refused to join the monastery.

Then the sweet voices and divine harmonies ceased; I heard the clanking of chains, the gnashing of teeth, piercing screams, the sound of gusty winds, as if during a terrible thunderstorm, and thunderclaps that forced me to bow my head and cover my ears.

A new insanity took possession of my mind: it seemed to me that all hell was dancing around me; terrible, disgusting ghosts came to me to grab me and carry me away with them; I began to pray fervently, my good guardian angel again appeared to me and pointed his finger at the monastery, but the thought of my elderly, weak parent held me back, and I did not dare to take a vow of monasticism.

The irritated angel disappeared, but I felt that Satan’s assistants were dragging, pinching, tormenting me, I was suffocating from the smell of sulfur, I lacked air, and the dizziness intensified. My whole body was covered with fetid sweat, blood flowed from my eyes, my mouth was like a burning stove, I did not dare to swallow my saliva, it was so bitter to eat. If I coughed, the splashes falling on my body would leave traces of strong vodka on it. I again began to call on my guardian angel. He appeared again, silent, motionless; his hand was stretched out towards the monastery.

My God! How I suffered!.. For a whole six months I struggled with this terrible nightmare, which tormented me hourly during the day; Finally, I was unable to resist any longer and wanted to leave my poor father to enter a monastery, believing that this was the will of God. Then my brother arrived from the army; he burned my books, drove the people with whom I was surrounded from the house, and after a few days, with the help of a doctor, these terrible ideas disappeared.

Sanity and health returned to me again, I embraced my brother, and now I can be of use to my elderly parent."

Even today there are people in villages who believe in werewolves, brownies, ghosts and demons who came out of hell; They assure you with the greatest composure that during the dark night they heard the sounds of chains and the sound of bones, that they were haunted by terrible ghosts, terrible monsters, and they tell all this with such simplicity that leaves no doubt about the reality of their words.

It often happens that ill-intentioned people, swindlers and thieves, dress up fantastically in order to scare fearful people and more successfully fulfill their criminal plans.

In this case, of course, there is no delusion of the senses; on the contrary, it exists if chimerical phenomena are the result of horror. Unfortunately, many, who by their duty should enlighten the ignorant and gullible class of people, try for their own personal benefits to keep it in the grossest superstition; so much the worse for fools, say those who laugh at this...

Now let's talk about the so-called "transparent" dreams.

The Institute for Psychophysiological Research in Oxford had been collecting reports of what they called "transparent" and "pre-transparent" sleep for some time.

A dream is called transparent when a person understands that he is dreaming.

In prelucid sleep, a person is not sure whether he is asleep or awake, and may never come to the right decision.

Here is one of the messages stored at the institute:

"I found myself with N (the narrator's friend) in a room at the other end of the corridor. I told him about the transparent dreams I had just seen, and suddenly I said:

"Of course, this is also a dream." - “Maybe. Who knows?” – N answered with a helpless smile. “Of course, this is a dream,” I said and went to the window. “Now I’ll fly.” “It will be stupid if this is not a dream,” said K, who was still calm and seemed to be making fun of me.”

Of course, you can see anything in a dream, including waking up from sleep. Many people dream that they wake up, lie in bed, get up, start getting dressed - and suddenly discover that it is all a dream, that they are still sleeping. Even the realization that they dreamed the first awakening does not guarantee the truth of the second awakening.

Bertrand Russell reported that one day, while waking up from anesthesia, he experienced "about a hundred" false awakenings.

Distinguishing sleep from wakefulness is not easy, at least not when sleeping. Those who have transparent dreams cannot trust their sensations, since touch, taste and smell in a dream are absolutely real.

Everything that can be experienced in reality can be experienced in a dream. In dreams, events can follow each other meaningfully, taking into account previous experience. In a dream, you can see how you wake up, get up, leave the house and do ordinary daily things one after another, until suddenly a doubt arises in the reality of what is happening. At this point, a person may remember similar difficulties that other people have had and compare them with their own and still not be confident in their own condition.

Are you sleeping or have you already woken up? Or is everything that happened to you today part of a complex dream? For a while, such questions may cause a twinge of doubt, but soon you put aside your doubts because you are sure that you are awake.

This confidence that we feel at the biological level is so certain that it has nothing to do with the mind.

One of the messages collected by the Oxford Institute captures this feeling very well: “I was wondering how I would know that I was really awake. I was often puzzled by this, but still I am sure that when you are really awake, you feel something different. I cannot clearly express this difference. However, it seems to me that in a dream one of the feelings is missing, perhaps the sense of responsibility."

So, if you doubt whether you are actually awake, rest assured that you are still dreaming.

This confidence turns pre-transparent dreams into transparent ones, bringing with it the confidence of the opposite. Probably, dreams differ from each other, as well as from the waking state, in something special and elusive. Despite the similarity of sensory experience and mental processes in the states of sleep and wakefulness, we can assert that these states are completely different and that the personality can express itself with equal ease in either of them, but not in both at the same time.

When you are awake, you can remember how wonderful it is to fly out of the window in your dream and soar freely over the tiled roofs of the village below. When you have a clear dream, you may remember how unpleasant it is to run your finger along a razor blade, and you may even try to compare the two sensations. Personality development is likely to depend on both types of experiences.

When we are awake, we are at the mercy of the forces that shape our body and the mind contained in it, but in a dream, as in a game, we have the opportunity to act outside of these forces, finding ourselves in a variety of circumstances, in order to then connect them with another of ours. experience and build a comprehensive and fruitful attitude towards life.

The fact that infants spend eighty percent of their sleep time dreaming, while old people spend less than fifteen percent, supports the hypothesis that dreams play an important role in the integration of experience.

Apparently, all dream content is derived from sensations received during wakefulness.

Helen Keller, who lost her sight, hearing and smell as a result of scarlet fever shortly after birth, often dreams. At first it was a purely physical, primitive experience, for example, something heavy was falling on her. Then, when she came to an experienced teacher who described the world to her in detail, she began to see dreams in a new dimension, but they were all firmly based on the only sense that she could trust.

"Once in a dream I held a pearl in my hands. I have no visual memory of the pearl. The one I saw in the dream was probably a figment of my imagination. It was a smooth, perfectly formed crystal..., dew and flame, velvety green moss in the muted white of lilies."

The dreams of congenitally blind people do not contain visual images and are not accompanied by the rapid eye movements characteristic of the dreams of sighted people.

One blind and deaf patient had never heard of dreams, but he remembered waking up one day in deep sadness, reliving the shock he had experienced when, putting his hand into the cage of his bird, he discovered its dead body.

The connection between sensations experienced in the waking state and experiences in sleep was confirmed during observations of the sleep of a deaf-mute person who usually communicated in sign language. When he dreamed that he was talking to other people in the usual way, an electromyograph attached to the sleeper's body noted strong motor currents, but not in the larynx, but in the fingers.

The dependence of dreams on information received in the waking state is enormous, but not absolute.

In 1965, Australian research showed that people who slept under the influence of strong sleeping pills could learn to distinguish between two sounds of different pitches, one of which was accompanied by an electric shock. When the same two sounds were played to a patient who was already awake, the encephalograph showed that their brains responded to the shock sound rather than the neutral sound.

This conditioning has long been touted by those who sell sleep-learning machines. Most research suggests that learning occurs primarily during periods when the learner is dozing or on the verge of sleep, but it is clear that sensitivity varies at different stages of sleep.

As we fall asleep, we go through four recognizable stages of orthodox sleep, as we fall deeper into sleep.

Then, when rapid eye movement begins and we enter paradoxical sleep, sudden quantitative changes occur. Muscle tone quickly drops and the body relaxes, spinal reflexes disappear, and even snoring stops. As brain activity increases, sensitivity decreases.

Apparently, the most complete escape from physical reality occurs when transparent sleep begins.

A lucid dreamer is almost impossible to awaken, and no reports mention a lucid dream involving external stimuli, as opaque dreams often do. When you know that you are dreaming, you achieve the most complete escape from body-related limitations.

There are many reports that dreams can provide information that cannot be obtained in any other way.

In New York, at the Maimonides Sleep Laboratory, Montague Ullman and Staali Krippner attempted to objectively analyze this possibility.

They hooked up subjects to a regular electroencephalograph and, after each rapid eye movement, woke them up and asked them what kind of dream they had. While they were doing this, a third person, in a room at the other end of the building, was thinking intensely about a painting chosen at random from a whole collection of paintings.

The next morning, the subjects were shown all the pictures and asked which one most resembled what they saw in their dreams. Many surprising correlations have been found.

One day, Orozco's painting was chosen for the experiment, depicting a group of Mexican revolutionaries moving against a dark background of swirling clouds and mountains. One of the participants in the experiment saw in a dream “New Mexico,” “heavy clouds and mountains” and “colossal film production.” Even when the connection between the dream and the picture was less obvious, a group of independent experts almost always easily found the desired picture based on the reported dreams.

This success is explained more by telepathy than by the spatial movement of the sleeper, but recent research from the same laboratory puts the problem in a new light.

In 1969, a young English physicist Malcolm Bessent joined the group of subjects, who saw in a dream a “bowl of fruit” when Kokovsky’s still life “Fruits and Flowers” ​​was according to plan, and “shallow pools” and “making a collage” when the collage was going according to plan called "Human Court".

But what makes this hit particularly surprising is that there was no one in the third room at night who was thinking about the paintings, and in some cases the painting was not taken away until the next morning.

Apparently, Bessent could not only travel in space, leaving his sleeping body, but also separate in time. It would be interesting to know if he had lucid dreams, because the separation of mind and body can be intentionally controlled when you realize you are dreaming.

One participant in the experiment, working with the Oxford Institute of Psychophysical Research, reports that in a transparent dream you can move anywhere simply by closing your eyes and “mentally concentrating.”

There is an old but well-documented case that illustrates all the possibilities contained in this situation.

On October 3, 1863, the steam ship City of Limerick left Liverpool, carrying Connecticut manufacturing owner S. R. Wilmot, heading home to his wife and family in the United States.

On the night of October 13, Wilmot dreamed that his wife entered the cabin in a nightgown, stood hesitantly at the door when she saw that there was another passenger there, then approached, kissed him and disappeared.

The next morning, his neighbor, described as “a reserved and very pious man,” suddenly stopped talking to him for no apparent reason. After persistent attempts to find out what was the matter, William Tait said: “How can you allow yourself to have a woman come to you in this form.” It turned out that, lying awake, he saw in reality exactly the same scene as Wilmot in his dream.

When the ship arrived in New York on October 23, Wilmot's wife immediately asked if he had seen her ten days ago. Knowing about the storms in the Atlantic and hearing reports of the death of another ship, she went to bed in great anxiety for her husband's life.

At night she felt that she was crossing a stormy sea, found a low black ship, passed through it, saw a stranger on the next bunk looking straight at her and lingered for a minute at the door, but still entered, kissed her husband and left the cabin. After questioning, she was able to accurately describe the cabin's features.

This case was carefully examined by the staff of the American Society for Psychical Research, and we have no reason to doubt the veracity of the participants in the events, but nevertheless, it is not possible to make a judgment about it a century later.

Today this story interests us from the point of view of the possibilities it contains. If everything happened exactly as described, then Wilmot and his wife had a common experience in a dream, while maintaining their own individuality, in a dream they saw and felt the same things that they would feel in reality, in ordinary life.

But the most amazing thing is that the awake Tait also took part in this event, having his own point of view. From the fact that he likely saw - and subsequently could describe - Wilmot's wife, it follows that the energy body we postulated earlier likely retains its recognizable form even after being separated from its physical counterpart.

Here we find ourselves in the very heart of a dark world of ghosts, where science has almost no chance of getting out of the fog of uncertainty.

Every person spends an average third of his life sleeping. The nature of the dream was incomprehensible and therefore frightening. Maybe that’s why, since ancient times, the content of a dream was considered a divine revelation, and a supernatural, higher meaning was attributed to the events of the dream. To decipher the message received in a dream, people turned to priests, shamans, oracles and other “professional dream interpreters.” Although the practice of seeking prophetic advice from such people still exists, today you can try to learn how to interpret your dreams yourself.

What does anyone dream about...

It must be said that differences in the content of dreams among representatives of different sexes appear from early childhood. Boys more often see monsters and large animals in their dreams, and girls more often see people and miniature cute animals. As for men and women, scientists have found that women's dreams are characterized by a feeling of anxiety. They often dream of childhood and parents, and, as a rule, this is associated with unpleasant experiences and danger. Modern women dream about work twice as often as their predecessors half a century ago. Visions about food, clothing and appearance are common. Men often dream of sex, naturally, with a beautiful woman, best of all, a stranger. Next comes the standard set: weapons, screwdrivers, pliers, cars and roads. Also, other men often appear in dreams, often as opponents.

The idea that lovers see each other in their dreams during the most turbulent period of their romance is greatly exaggerated. In dreams, women see women first, and men see men first.

As for the perception of dreams, most visit us in the form of pictures. Much less often they are associated with hearing and touch. But almost no one succeeds in sniffing sleep.

Sweet dreams!

Nutrition is of great importance. If we eat heavily before bed, our body has to do the hard work of digesting food while we sleep, it doesn't get proper rest, and we are more likely to have bad dreams. Experts recommend eating at least three hours before bed. Sleeping between 10 and 12 pm has the best restorative effect on the body. It is better to go to bed at this time if you need to get a good night's sleep in a short time.

Before going to bed, it is advised to pay attention to the state of your consciousness. This is extremely important. It is very useful to disconnect from everyday activities and worries for at least fifteen minutes before bed: read, listen to music or talk with children on abstract topics.

The dream knows the answer!

Sleep can also help solve problems. It is amazing how many of the greatest discoveries in human history were the result of revelation that came at the moment of awakening! Before going to bed, a person thinks about a certain problem. In a dream, he focuses on her on a subconscious level. When he wakes up, the problem is solved.

Types of dreams.

Dreams can be classified according to many criteria. Dr. Richard L. Thompson identifies four types of dreams:

• 1. The first type includes dreams that arise as a result of psychological stimulation. Thus, physical ailments, discomfort, and external influences give rise to a special world of dreams. If you put a wet sheet on your feet, you may dream that you are crossing a river. If you put a pillow on your chest, you may dream that someone is sitting on you or that a stone has fallen on you. And the subconscious mind can transform a train whistle into the image of a fire engine;
• 2. The second type includes the realization of thoughts dormant in the subconscious. During sleep, the level of control of consciousness decreases, and a person is confronted with unconscious drives that are blocked by consciousness in the waking state. Thus, erotic dreams involving your neighbor may indicate desires that you do not admit to yourself;
• 3. The third type of dreams reflects the thoughts that dominate our consciousness while we are awake. For example, if we are constantly hungry, most of our dreams will be about food and the search for it. In modern society, people are often focused on work and sex, which are the focus of most dreams. Information received from the media has a very strong influence on our thoughts, so we should be more careful with horror films, contemporary news reports, etc. Often close people, being separated, can see each other in a dream. In the same way, what we think about immediately before going to sleep sets the direction of our dreams;
• 4. Type 4 dreams help us practice the lessons we need to learn throughout our lives. It is possible to acquire certain qualities - openness, lightness, responsibility, perhaps learn to love or forgive. After all, it often happens like this: when we wake up in the morning, we feel that we have become different, and the situation in which we found ourselves in a dream taught us something and enriched our inner world. The main thing is not to forget this feeling in the bustle of the day...

The ancients believed that every person has a soul, which during sleep separates from the body shell and travels to the upper worlds, to the abodes of the gods. On this journey, she can receive information about upcoming events, all of which is reflected in dreams. There are still systems that originate in the Vedic and ancient Egyptian traditions and teach, as an exact science, the ability to consciously leave the physical body and travel during sleep - so-called astral travel.

Setting to remember.

There are people who say they never dream. In fact, it would be more correct to say that they do not remember their dreams. Laboratory studies have established that each of us has about five periods during the night when we have dreams. During a dream, rapid movement of the eyeballs occurs behind closed eyelids. This phase of sleep is called the REM phase. Due to the fact that during the night each person has about five such phases, it is almost impossible to remember all dreams. In addition, the transition of consciousness from the dreaming phase to the waking phase is accompanied by the erasure of dream images. So the challenge is to catch the dream before it disappears forever. How can I do that?

Tell yourself right before you go to sleep: “The first thing I will do when I wake up is write down what I saw in my dream.” Immediately after waking up, it is better to try not to move, not to get out of bed right away, but to concentrate on the night’s experience. To record dreams, you can use a notepad and pen or a tape recorder placed at the head of the bed at night. What is important are the key characters of the dream, their actions and, above all, your own feelings during the dream process.

Write down everything you can remember. Even if it's just a fleeting sensation or sensation. Even if it's just a short phrase, for example: "I'm in the garden." Perhaps, at the moment when your hand writes this phrase, some memories of the garden and what happened there will spontaneously emerge. And even if you don’t remember another word, don’t scold your unconscious, on the contrary, thank it and ask that next time you will be able to remember more.

Even if you don't have any memories, ask yourself what feelings and sensations you have now. Sooner or later, if you adhere to this rule, something will definitely begin to be remembered.

If, at the same time as setting up to record dreams, you tune in immediately upon waking up to call someone or check if a teenage child is at home, or prepare food, most likely, when you wake up, you will perform exactly these necessary and useful actions, and your dreams will quickly dissolve.

And if you really want to remember your dreams, then success is guaranteed.

What if there are no dreams?

In a laboratory experiment, subjects were awakened at the beginning of each period of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and then allowed to go back to sleep, so that they slept a sufficient amount of time during the night, but were deprived of dreams. By the fifth night they had to be woken up twenty or thirty times a night. They became irritable, anxious, tense, and could not concentrate. Other subjects who were woken up just as often, but not during PBS, did not develop similar symptoms. Once people were allowed to sleep normally, these symptoms disappeared, and in the first few nights after the experiment, they had four times more PBS per night. That is, dreams are necessary for the body. The role of sleep for the human body is to restore and unload.

Interpretation of dreams.

The interpretation of dreams is a rather subjective thing. Based on our experience, we have to develop our own system of assessments of what we experience during the dream process. Dream books, as a rule, give general information and do not take into account our individual characteristics. Only we ourselves can accurately decipher our own dreams.

Searching for associations is one of the most important aspects of working with dreams. It is necessary to find out what associations this or that image evokes in the person who had the dream. If you ask, for example, “What comes to your mind when you think about an airplane?”, you may hear in response: “Last week I flew on a business trip,” or “When I was little, I was afraid of flying,” or “My uncle is a pilot." Which of the associations found provide the key to a correct understanding of the dream can usually be recognized by a specific internal sensation: “Aha! This is it...". David Loff, who has studied dreams, gives this example. Suppose a two-year-old child stamps his feet in anger, begging for candy. Then, forty-three years later, he sees a beautiful woman outside his office. That same evening he has the following dream: “I entered a supermarket. I have a lot of money and a shopping list with me. Instead of buying what my wife needed, I practically emptied all the candy shelves. The cashier, whose face seemed familiar to me, smiled and said, “You seem to know what you need.” When I arrived home, my wife looked at the candy and left me forever. Honestly, I didn't care."

For an adult forty-five-year-old man who committed an insane act, neglected his family and bought countless amounts of candy, the epithet “abnormal” suggests itself. At the same time, you are unlikely to find the hysteria that a two-year-old boy threw over candy strange or unnatural. But since candy and beauty were deposited in the brain on a shelf called “desire,” two seemingly unrelated images were intertwined in one dream.

This is why it is so important to see the whole picture before analyzing its individual episodes. You may find upon first examination that none of the dream images relate directly to the others. But you will still be able to determine the prevailing thoughts and main messages of the dream.

The more problems a person has due to environmental pressure or harsh upbringing, the more difficult it is for the subconscious to convey a clear message. If you look closely at dreams, you will notice certain qualities in them that show what meaning the mind wants to attach to them. For example, color dreams are considered by some experts to be more important than black and white dreams. If the mind “colors” dreams, then it seems to draw our attention: “Look, this is an important message!” It matters how we feel when we wake up. For example, if we have been killing people all night and, despite this, wake up in a good mood, this does not at all mean that we have discovered our true, sadistic nature. In such a dream we dealt with various aspects of our ego. On the other hand, if we spent the whole night helping old ladies cross the street and yet woke up feeling somehow strange, then most likely we were thinking about inheriting their property or something like that.

That is, our feelings at the moment of awakening are really very important. If I feel fear in a dream, the dream is probably telling me to let go of fear. If in a dream I am upset or angry, the dream brings me to the need to get rid of anger or annoyance. If I feel love or other good feelings, the dream tells me to open my heart. The purpose of our dreams is to help us become more aware and express ourselves.

It is believed that:

• - a dream that occurs just before waking up can speak of the near future;
• - any dream that repeats from time to time (sometimes with some variations) indicates some important unfinished business.

Once you decipher the meaning of this dream, every reappearance of it will let you know that in your real life the very situation that “triggers” this dream has arisen again.

Dreams are nightmares.

As for nightmares, sometimes they are caused by hostility between our different subpersonalities: one says, for example, “I want to go to the cinema,” the second says, “I need to work.” If you discover such a conflict and are able to find ways to reconcile and meet the needs of the warring parties, there will be a release of enormous energy that will be at your disposal.

Often a person awakens from a nightmare at the very last second, when he is on the edge of a cliff and stones are flying from under his feet, or when he is tied up on the rails and a fast train is thundering toward him, or when he is rushing in a car. with failed brakes down a steep hill...

If this happens to you, you can try this technique: mentally return to your dream, feel the same feeling of fear, let the events continue, and bring the dream in your imagination to its logical end.

One of the unpleasant consequences of taking barbiturates as a sleeping pill (and getting used to them) is that when a person suddenly stops taking them, a “rapid sleep pendulum” effect occurs, or, in other words, the number of dreams per night sharply increases. Some of these dreams can be very severe nightmares.

The Senoi dream technique was named after a tribe in Malaysia. If you're having a nightmare and somehow realize it's just a dream, look straight into the face of the danger: a robber, a tidal wave, a wild animal, whatever it is. Don't run away. Seeing your strength and resilience, the enemy may retreat. If you have to engage in mortal combat with him, know that you can call on your friends or a fairy-tale assistant to help you.

After all, this is your dream. It’s even better if you can turn your enemy into an ally. dream mental associative

It is very important to remain safe and sound. From the experience of such a struggle, which you went into, knowing that nothing really threatens you, you can learn very valuable lessons.

The aforementioned Malaysian tribe was characterized by a life philosophy of cooperation, the absence of the mentally ill and the great attention they paid to dreams. Every day at breakfast, the adults encouraged the children to talk about their dreams. They were then given advice on how to resist the attacking demons the next night. At the same time, it was emphasized that one must always go forward and not give up, calling on one’s friends for help if necessary. It was believed that if a sleeper failed to defeat an evil spirit and turn it into an ally, it would unite with even more evil spirits, and then the unfortunate person would find himself faced with countless hordes of hostile forces.

If a child dreamed that he was falling and woke up in fright before the end of the fall, he was advised to relax next time under similar circumstances and try to get the most out of the flight.

“The spirits of the fall love you. They invite you with them to the land of spirits.”

The child was taught that he should try to discover something beautiful or useful in this country and bring it to his tribe. It could be a new dance, music, instrument. Thus, the dream, which began with the anxiety of falling, turned into a wonderful flight during which the child made a discovery. Subsequently, however, no traces of the Senoi’s use of the “Senoi technique of working with dreams” were found, which, however, in no way reduces the value and effectiveness of this technique, especially for working with recurring dreams.

Dreams are one of the most mysterious phenomena in the world. Many have attempted to explain their nature. Among them are scientists known throughout the world - Jung, Freud and others.

Thus, one of the founders of philosophical voluntarism, Friedrich Nietzsche, argued that sleep is a respite from the cruel clarity of reality. Arthur Schopenhauer considered sleep a part of death. But Sigmund Freud viewed dreams not only as something directly related to the work of the brain at the moment of wakefulness, but also as certain encrypted messages from the subconscious to the conscious mind.

There are some religious interpretations of this mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon. A dream in the Christian worldview is interpreted as God's revelation. There are examples in the Holy Scriptures that support this statement - famine in Egypt was predicted by a vision of skinny cows. Under the influence of a dream, Pilate's wife advised her husband not to pass judgment on Christ.

Secular history, not just sacred history, is replete with descriptions of prophetic dreams. According to ancient sources, Emperor Marciatus, on the night when Attila died, dreamed of the broken bow of the Hunnic conqueror. Also, according to historians, the assassination attempt on Julius Caesar would have failed if he had paid attention to the dreams of Calpuria, his wife.

Many cases of prophetic dreams are known from history. It is believed that Leonardo da Vinci, the genius of the Middle Ages, made his discoveries exclusively in dreams and then encrypted them on paper. After his death, the Great Dante appeared in a dream to his son and told him where the verse of the Divine Comedy was kept. Mendeleev also saw his periodic table in a dream. A young American woman had a strange dream in early April 1912. She dreamed that her mother was fleeing a shipwreck in a boat with other people, and around her hundreds of passengers were floundering in the icy water. Much later it became known that the mother of this American woman was among the surviving passengers of the Titanic. The woman did not know that her mother was going to sail on a ship to America.

Edward Sampson, an employee of the Boston newspaper The World, had a truly prophetic dream in 1883. He saw the grandiose tragedy in the smallest detail, and, upon waking up, he wrote it all down in the form of a story. He wrote about thousands of natives from the island of Pralome being washed out to sea by gigantic torrents of mud. Everything was accompanied by monstrous peals of thunder, ending in an explosion that destroyed the entire island. The editor, who saw the manuscript on the table, thought it was a telegraph message and published it in the newspaper. An article about the terrible disaster on August 29, 1883 instantly spread across the most important newspapers in America. There was no continuation of the story, and the newspapers were about to give a refutation, when unexpectedly huge waves surged onto the American shores. Following this, reports began to arrive about the greatest disaster that occurred in the Indian Ocean. On August 27, the volcano on the island of Krakatoa began to tremble, and literally the next day it exploded. The entire island sank into the waters of the Sunda Strait on August 29. In this story, only the name of the island did not coincide. And only many years later, the historical society gave Edward Samson an old map. Amazingly, on it the island of Krakatoa was called Pralome. This was the native name of the island, which had not been used for more than a century.

How can we explain the nature of dreams? Sometimes dreams are called a parallel world, virtual reality, mini-death, entertainment for the brain. But where does a person’s consciousness get plots for dreams and why does he need it? What other tasks does the body solve during sleep, besides physical rest?

The simplest part of the answer lies in human physiology. As experiments show, it is the higher part of the nervous system that determines the need for sleep. The cells of the cerebral hemispheres of the cerebral cortex get tired quite quickly. Then inhibition acts as a means of protection, protecting them from destruction and exhaustion, and a state of sleep arises. During 7-8 hours of night sleep, the brain enters a state of deep sleep, which lasts from half an hour to 90 minutes. In the 15-minute intervals between such dreams, episodes of REM sleep occur. If a person is not disturbed, then by the end of the night the duration of slow-wave sleep decreases and the number of episodes of REM sleep increases. According to scientists, a person spends about a third of his life sleeping. Some call it a waste of precious time, while others believe that this is their second life, full of real impressions, dreams and fantasies.

So what is sleep?

Maybe sleep is a natural opportunity to come into contact with other, parallel worlds? After all, how else can you explain the fact that sometimes people dream of certain places that they have not been to in material life? And what is most surprising is that sometimes people, after some time, return to the same places in their dreams. If the dream were not a reality existing on some plane, but just a projection of human consciousness, then he would not be able to get there again. Projections are spontaneous and fickle, and the chance of the brain randomly creating the same picture twice is equal to the chance of a person randomly rolling thousands of dice and ending up with the same combination. And how can one explain the reality of the feelings experienced by a person in a dream - feelings that are sometimes more real and vivid than in the real world? This can only be explained by the fact that these feelings were actually real, only in some other dimension. Very often, in a dream, people try a certain dish that they have never seen before or visit a country they have never been to. In dreams, people see giant comets floating in space. The human brain simply does not have enough information to create taste sensations, which, however, does not prevent him from feeling the taste of an unfamiliar dish in a dream.

Since ancient times, people have been interested in the problem of the relationship between dreams and reality. Since the times of Ancient Greece and Ancient China, philosophers have been attracted by the mysterious world of dreams. Quite famous is the story of the dream of Zhuang Tzu, one of the founders of Taoism. One day he dreamed that he became a moth. And when he woke up, he no longer knew who he really was - a moth who dreamed that he became Tzu, or Chuang Tzu, who dreamed that he was a moth. In Taoism, the equation of reality and sleep plays an important philosophical role - sleep must be treated as reality, but life must also be treated as a dream.

So is the reality of a dream subjective or are dreams actually real? One of the main evidence in favor of the reality of dreams is the prophetic dreams that were mentioned earlier. Those. the ability to receive information about future events during sleep. Of all the recorded cases of telepathy, most of them also occurred in dreams. The possibility of telepathic influence on the content of dreams has been scientifically documented. All this allows us to conclude that dreams are real after all. This phenomenon is not so simple and it is not for nothing that all living organisms have the ability to dream.

Today, in most countries of the world, specialized research institutes are studying the nature of sleep. They are called “Sleep Laboratory”, “Sleep Institute”, etc. However, sleep research is a rather murky process. Dreams have many mysteries, and the main task of sleep science is to shed light on this mysterious phenomenon.

What are dreams? Where do they come from? What do amazing fantasy images mean? Until now, neither scientists nor masters of esotericism have given an indisputable and unambiguous answer to these questions. And although attitudes to the issue change over time, dreams remain the most mysterious part of a person’s life.

In ancient times, people were sure: night visions are news from the spirits of the family, gods or ancestors, in this way mysterious forces communicate with those living today. Local sages, sorcerers and shamans had to decipher these messages. When, over time, primitive beliefs gave way to religious systems, the interpretation of dreams became the task of priests of various cults. At that time, night visions were taken more than seriously. As you know, in Ancient Greece, special temples were even built, where visitors came to sleep if they needed to see a prophetic dream, and the ministers of the cult helped with the interpretation. The first dream book that has come down to us also appeared there - a five-volume book written by Artemidorus of Daldian.

If you have a nightmare, you need to look out the window and say three times:
“Wherever there is night, there comes sleep”

In the era of Christianity, dreams continued to be treated with great reverence. They looked for a secret meaning in them, trying to unravel what clues were given by higher powers. And this is not surprising: even the Bible describes prophetic dreams.

At a later time, with the development of science, attitudes towards dreams began to change. Sigmund Freud created his own concept of their interpretation, discarding everything strange and mystical. From the point of view of the famous psychologist and his followers, dreams are a storehouse of information about personality, valuable material for psychoanalysis.

But interest in the mystical side of night visions, despite the popularity of the scientific approach, has not faded away. The services of magicians and fortune tellers, seers and dream interpreters have always been in demand, although they were not cheap.

So, in what worlds does the soul wander while you are quietly snoring in your bed, what experience does it gain from these wanderings and what can what it sees mean? If all these questions concern you, if you are worried about a strange dream, if you want to know what it is for, our online dream book will become an excellent interpretative consultant. Moreover, here you can get all the answers completely free of charge.

Miller's famous dream book, interpretations from the legendary soothsayer Vanga, apt author's interpretations from Nostradamus, Loff, Yuri Long, Tsvetkov, as well as amazing ethnic collections: Old Russian, Muslim, Persian, Ukrainian, Chinese - you will find all this with us. To make the interpretation of dreams as accurate as possible, use our recommendations.