Dreamspeak

By: Milton Kramer, Marc Ian Barasch

Focuses on research on dreams. Details on the dreams of a volunteer in a sleep laboratory; Meaning of dreams; Information on the
Selective Mood Regulatory Theory of Dreams and Sleep. INSET: Dreams of glory.

Dreams are a theater of the emotions, where we playout the day's dramas that were left "to be continued."

Research has shown us that dreams are not just the machinations of the unconscious on random play.

We all go to bed with the problems of the day still on our minds. Unfortunately, a day is not like a play, which gets resolved
by the time the final curtain falls. But dreams, with their colorful characters and settings, can play out that final scene while we sleep,
processing the emotions we encounter in our waking lives.

Forty years of research on dreams suggests that they are not just the random firings of our brains. Neither are they highly
symbolic visions that should chart the course of our lives. But dreams do, in fact, have meaning. And our research shows that the
nature of that meaning helps determine our mood the next day. That, in turn, determines how we function and what we can
accomplish. Quite simply, the dreams we have at night set the stage for our actions the following day, priming us .to either rise and
shine and conquer the world, or crawl back under the covers and duck the challenges that lie ahead.

For 13 nights, we monitored the dreams of Linda, 24, a volunteer, in our sleep laboratory. Whenever she was in rapid eye
movement (REM) sleep--with her eyes darting from side to side, her brain waves speeded up, and her pulse, breathing and blood
pressure fluctuating--she was awakened and asked to report any dreams she had experienced. One night, she reported the following
series of dreams.

1) "This little girl was asleep. She was being real cute, prolonging things for money or to stay in the hospital longer."
2) "I passed Frank's wife in the car. She saw me come ....She pulled away. I got kind of mad. I decided it didn't make any difference."
3) "I was playing tennis. I hit it back real hard. We won the game."
4) "A patient didn't need the doctor after all. She started out thinking she needed a doctor but she didn't. She had a big bandage on her
stomach."
5) "Doctor was not able to treat the patient. He was not properly licensed. Patient is planning to use surgery against the doctor."

Although she had hit the sack feeling sleepy, a bit foggy, a little unhappy, and annoyed (she had mistakenly assumed the
experiment was for one night and that she would be paid), Linda slept for her usual seven-and-a-half-hours and awakened refreshed,
alert, happier and no longer irritable, ready to engage the day.

Was the change in Linda's mood a consequence of what went on during her sleep? My colleagues and I otter a resounding
yes. Our work has led us to develop the Selective Mood Regulatory Theory of Dreams and Sleep. It holds that for Linda, as well as for
everyone else, feeling better upon waking is a result of both getting uninterrupted sleep for an adequate length of time and of
experiencing a series of otherwise unremembered dreams that engage disturbing feelings. (In our testing, the periodic awakenings
were brief enough and the subjects young enough that sleep was not effectively interrupted.)

Linda's dreams were of a progressive nature. In them, she went from a clingy little girl to an assertive woman in charge of her
life. It started with a dependent longing to be cared for by the doctor (father figure). This desire stirred the fear of being rejected by a
married woman (mother figure). The tension between the desire to be cared for and the fear of rejection was resolved in the third
dream, in which she had a victory with a partner of her own. In the fourth dream, she tried to reject the desire to be cared for, but the
need for care still existed (the bandage). In the last dream, she asserted a more vigorous rejection of the doctor, serving to deny her
need and the doctor's ability to meet that need.

We all have multiple dreams across the night, but not all of them succeed at untying our emotional knots. After examining a
large number of dream series, my colleagues and I have discovered two modes of dream processing, two ways of responding to our
unresolved problems. One mode, which we call a progressive sequence, resolves emotional problems by working through them step
by step, and by comparing them to previous challenges that at some point or another we met successfully. The other, called a repetitive
sequence, fails to resolve emotional problems but simply repeats them metaphorically over and over during the night's dreaming
without charting any progress. With a repetitive sequence of dreams, we can awaken in a worse mood than when we went to bed.

If Linda had been more on edge, or if her problem had not been well-handled in the past, she might have experienced a
repetitive sequence, the dream equivalent of just continuing to worry about a problem and not resolving it. On another night in the
laboratory, she did have one such dream sequence:
1) "Somebody was lost. It was a dog and they were trying to find out where it lived. A little kid or somebody couldn't tell where he
lives. It wasn't my dog though. I wasn't lost. The person who was lost was fumbling around leading everybody else around because he
didn't know what he was doing. Somehow, we had phone numbers and we were trying to find the right one. It was supposed to be the
little boy who was lost."
2) "They filled up the car. There wasn't enough room, unless I went back with the people we went back with before. I could go back
with someone else. The place we were going was an orphanage someplace, some house, a place like that."
3) "I was dreaming about visiting. I think it was some EEG laboratory or something like that where the mothers could leave their
children and go shopping. I doubt whether they could, though; there wouldn't be enough room for all these people."

In the dreams of this night, Linda illustrated a fear of being abandoned and an uncertainty as to whether her efforts to
reconnect would work--calling on the telephone, riding in a car, or being picked up. It was no wonder she awakened disgruntled the
following morning, having failed to engage her issues metaphorically during the night.

What determines whether we will have a helpful or unhelpful sequence of dreams? It depends on two factors: whether there
is in our emotional arsenal a solution to the kind of problem at hand, and whether we happen to be up to the task. Just as some days we
are more productive than others, seemingly without rhyme or reason, so some of our dream experiences are more useful than others in
solving life's quandaries.

Research has shown us that dreams are not just the machinations of the unconscious on random play. They have order, and
they reflect important psychological aspects of our lives and personalities. When we examined the dream reports from a representative
sample of people from Cincinnati, we found that there were similarities among the dreams of distinct groups--men and women, young
and old, blacks and whites, married and single people, and between those of lower and middle social classes. If dreams were random,
we would not have found any similarities.

We also have shown that dreams vary from person to person--they are individualized, like fingerprints--as well as from day to
day, reinforcing the idea that the events of each day play out in the night's dreams.

These psychological regularities prove that the dream experience has order, and as we have seen in the laboratory, order
paves the way for meaning. The nature of that meaning--how Linda interacted with Frank's wife, for example, and whether the
outcome was favorable--can change our mood for better or worse from night to morning.

Changes in mood across the night turn out to be related to the people and activities that populate subjects' dreams. The
production of a happy mood is particularly related to the types of people who appear in the intervening dreams.

In order to study the relationship between mood change and a night's dreams, we recruited 20 volunteers, both men and
women, to sleep for 20 consecutive nights in the sleep laboratory. We had them rate their mood before and after going to sleep in terms
of how friendly, aggressive, happy, clear-thinking, sleepy and anxious they felt. During the night, we awakened them at the end of
each REM period and had them report their dreams. We found that their mood changed across the night along with changes in their
dream content. And that as in Linda's case, the key to those mood changes was a matter of who starred in the dream and what scenes
they acted out.

It is important to note that the specific individuals in the dream are unimportant. It is the roles they represent that carry the
meaning. In Linda's dream, for example, Frank's wile was merely playing the role of wife, any wife. Rather than Jungian archetypes,
the characters in our dreams--an older man, a female peer--are the vehicle for helping us deal with a central issue. They are actors in
the theater of our unconscious, playing out the day's emotional dramas that have been left "to be continued."

Freud, a careful and astute observer of the manifestations of a variety of behavioral states, including sleep and depression,
claimed that dreams are the guardians of sleep continuity. Since sleep can potentially be interrupted by emotional surges--from the
day's unresolved issues bubbling up to the surface--the function of dreaming, Freud has suggested, is to contain or "diffuse" these
emotional surges, which biological studies have confirmed exist.

We need sleep to be continuous if we are to improve our mood over the course of the night. In our experiments, we found a
decrease in the capacity to contain the emotional surge among patients having nightmares. In other words, nightmares occur when
dreams fail to blunt the body's emotional response, whereas successful dreaming controls and suppresses the feeling in dreams and
protects the continuity of sleep.

REM-stage sleep, when the body undergoes changes in breathing, heart rate and blood pressure, presents the greatest risk for
waking up. REM sleep is distributed during the night, with more in the second half, in such a way that as the likelihood of awakening
increases, so increases the likelihood of the occurrence of REM sleep--and its protective dreams. Patients who report loss of dreaming
after a brain injury experience poorer sleep than those who continue dreaming.
 In another study--on the relationship between mood change and the physiology of sleep--we ruled out the possibility that the
mood change was the result of other Factors: the amount of sleep a person got during the night, the amount of REM sleep a person got
during the night, or the mere passage of eight hours. We did this by depriving a group of individuals of sleep and seeing how their
mood changed compared to those who had slept well. We found that, the following day, the sleep-deprived felt mentally foggy, more
groggy and more aggressive--physiological conditions that sleep would have improved. Most importantly, they were also less happy,
because they did not experience dreams, which would have regulated their mood. This mood alteration is one that anyone who has
stayed up studying, working or partying knows well. (Interestingly, the group did feel more friendly, however, having spent the
previous eight hours in a group, rather than alone.)

Although it has been a bone of contention among scientists, we believe our research shows that the change in the happy mood
during the night is related to dream content and not just the fact of sleep.

Whether or not we are happy is not just a touchy-feely, quality-of-life issue. Employers have a tendency to say, "You may
feel good but it's not going to produce more Nike sneakers or design a better building," but we believe it will. How we feel influences
how well we function in waking life. Happiness affects performance.

Fortunately, most dream series are of the progressive type, repairing our mood from bedtime to morning. In our studies, such
decreases in mood intensity occurred on about 60% of the 1,000 nights we studied. It's as if an emotional thermostat kicks in during
the night to warm the mood that may have chilled during the day.

Our waking and dreaming lives have a great deal in common. With whom we spend the night and how well things work,
awake or asleep, largely determine our happiness.

dreams of glory

Western culture has privatized our dreams, regarding them solely as products of our innermost life. But certain dreams take
us well beyond ourselves, tearing down the gated communities of our psyche.

There are dreams and there are dreams. Most of us have had--or will have--at least one dream that stops us in our tracks,
when the evanescent wisps of the night gather the force of a Kansas tornado barreling straight for Oz. Such dreams are more than
emotional coffee grounds and crumpled up impulses toward sex and violence that the waking mind nightly ditches down some inner
disposal. Such dreams tell us that we are not who we think we are. They reveal dimensions beyond the everyday. People the world
over have described such experiences. But we in the West have had only a sketchy understanding of what I call Healing Dreams--ones
which, if we heed them, can guide us toward greater wholeness and have the power to transform our lives.

It has been standing policy in psychology that dreams are not meant to be enacted on the social stage; they are treated as
personal creations that speak to the dreamer alone. But Healing Dreams chafe at such boundaries. They convey in symbolic terms
surprisingly accurate images of disease and healing. They are also well-informed about our intimate relationships. But what is more,
they are shrewd observers of our wider social backdrop. They are remarkably attuned to the clamor of community, to the nuances of
the body politic, even to the fate of the earth. A Healing Dream wants to wriggle free of our solitary nets and head into open water,
toward communion with the greater conclave of souls.

This may be a little frightening. Dreams are often socially transgressive. They champion the rude, lewd and wholly
unacceptable.

People who act out their dreams on the social stage can be dangerous, becoming prey to delusions, dragging others along
with them. When Julius Caesar dreamed he was sleeping with his mother, his royal dream interpreter told him he would soon possess
Rome, the mother city. Caesar duly marched southward to take the capital. Would he and the world have been better off if, rather than
setting out on the road to conquest, he had brought his dream to a therapist to work through his Oedipus complex?

In dreamwork, psychologists wisely counsel that we "keep the lid on the pot"; "withdraw the projections" back into the inner
world. Our tradition of "psychologizing" the dream rather than, as in some cultures, acting upon it, is no small cultural achievement.
But has Western psychology been too eager to bottle up the dream in the consulting room, forbidding it a wider life? Healing Dreams
often speak to collective issues. They crave the give-and-take between the inner and outer worlds.

They confront us with our own unmet social potential, calling upon us each to know ourselves as part of the whole.

In The Forgotten Language, the neo-Freudian analyst Erich Fromm writes that in dreams, "we are concerned exclusively with
ourselves...in which 'I am' is the only system to which thoughts and feelings refer." Yet the privatization of the dream remains a
peculiarly Western practice. Dreams in many cultures--the Plains Indians, for example--are a key component of social problem-
solving, with vital public and even political implications.
 The Zuni Indians of New Mexico have a custom of making public their "bad" dreams ("good" dreams, however, are
sometimes withheld even from close relatives). Among the Quiche of Guatemala, all dreams, even small fragments, are shared
immediately with family and tribe. An Australian aborigine told me, "We tell our dreams to the group because different people have
different gifts and might help understand it. We have a saying, 'Share it out before the next sunrise.'" It sounded to me like the informal
dream-sharing groups that have sprung up in Western societies over the past several decades--until, that is, he added a comment I
found particularly intriguing: "We often meet each other while we're sleeping."

One society which reportedly followed a dream-sharing regimen was the Temiar Senoi, a jungle tribe of 10,000 living in the
Cameron Highlands of Malaysia. Researcher Kilton Stewart reported in 1954 that if, for example, a child dreamed he had been
attacked by a friend, his father would advise him to tell his friend about it. Then the friend would be advised by his father to give the
dreamer a present and go out of his way to be friendly to him, in case he had offended the dreamer without wishing to.

"Thus," said Stewart, "the aggression building up around the image of the friend in the dreamer's mind thereby became the
basis of a friendly exchange." Later in the day, dreams would be discussed by the entire community, and the messages and insights
they contained would become part of the ritual and behavior of waking life.

Whether Stewart's Rousseauian portrait can be taken at face value or was a confabulation, remains an open question. Yet
decades of research have revealed that tribal cultures the world over give dreams a central role in their collective lives. Barbara
Tedlock reports that dreams are of such integral importance to Mexico's Quiche Maya that one out of four are initiated as
"daykeepers," their term for dream interpreters. And the tales of the Temiar Senoi, whether apocryphal or historical, have been an
inspiration to those seek Aborigines claim to meet each other during sleeping to bring dreams into the realm of social discourse.

One such person is the Unitarian minister Jeremy Taylor, who began running dream groups while performing civilian
alternative service during the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector. He was assigned to do community organizing in Emeryville,
California, an "all-black, working- and underclass" community. Tensions between blacks and whites in the group ran high, and
meetings often degenerated into name-calling sessions.

One day Taylor suggested that they stop talking about waking life and instead start sharing their dreams. Many confessed
they were having "nasty, racist dreams...of being attacked and menaced by sinister, hostile and dangerous people of other races."
Though he feared such dreams could be like pouring gasoline on the fire, soon a more open form of dialogue began to emerge. It
became clear to everyone, he says, that the "nasty" dream characters were unintegrated, undeveloped aspects of their own
personalities, denied and projected onto others. They realized, writes Taylor, that "these ugly, scary, dark, powerful, sexy, violent,
irresponsible, dangerous dream figures are vitally alive parts of my own authentic being." Gradually, he reports, "repressions were
released, projections withdrawn. ..."

He notes that cynicism, too, started to evaporate: "Authentic personal likes and dislikes began to replace ritual 'politeness,'
blundering patronizing comments and repressed fear," Taylor writes. "The energy that had previously been squandered
counterproductively in maintaining the repression and projection suddenly came welling up...as spontaneous surges of vitality and
welt-being...creative possibility and enthusiasm." The group dreamwork contributed to a style of interracial, grassroots political
organizing which eventually helped elect the first black public officials in what had been called "the most corrupt community in
California."

The dreamer may be dismayed to find himself face to face with, even in thrall to, denizens of circles and rungs of society he
in waking life tries to avoid. Dreams are the great leveler. But it is hard to avoid the fact--indeed, it is a little mortifying-that these
images come close to cartoonish stereotypes. Even for those of us who pride ourselves on having a social conscience, our prejudices
against the "other" have deep psychic roots. Such broad-stroke dream images function as emblems for what is ignored, repressed and
denied--not just in my psyche, but in society at large.

Such images serve to undermine the ego's view of status and social position, its preposterous belief that we're not all in this
together, that some of us are "above" others, that we can really wall ourselves off from our neighbors. The psyche has no such gated
communities.

Though most of us are only too glad to see the upside-down world of the dream dissipate in the morning sun, these images
are a potential source of social healing, telling us we cannot remain comfortably distanced from others' suffering. In our prejudices,
fears and abdications of human connection, it is ourselves we are rejecting--the tender, wounded parts that contain our greatest wealth
of soul.

Kramer, Milton and Barasch, Marc Ian. “dreampseak.” Psychology Today. Sept/Oct 2000.

07 Jan. 2009 < http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20000901-000035.html>.

 Why We Dream
By: Hara Estroff Marano

Neuroscientist Mark Solms explains how dreams may protect and distract our brains from the outside world and allow the body to rest

If dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, as Freud claimed, then that route may be a highway full of tortuous twists
and turns—leading nowhere. But it affords some spectacular vistas along the way.

By turns, dreams have been deemed prophecies of the future, full of meaning—if only someone could figure out what it is—
or the effluence of nerve cells randomly unwinding from a busy day. Once considered a hallmark of the periodic surges of brain
activity known as rapid-eye-movement sleep, dreaming now seems somewhat less bundled up; at least 25 percent of dreams are
scattered through other parts of the night. Dreaming has been seen as critical for learning, or at least important for solving problems—
or as nice but unnecessary. It's an emblem of mental illness—or a safety shield deflecting it.

The newest switchback on dreams comes from South African neuroscientist Mark Solms. Maybe, says Solms, we've been
confusing cause and effect. Dreams, he suggests, are not a by-product of sleep, as has been assumed all along. Dreaming may be what
allows us to sleep in the first place.

"Dreams protect sleep," Solms says. They furnish an ersatz world to keep the brain temporarily occupied in its unyielding
quest for activity. His iconoclastic view of dreams springs from emerging evidence that REM sleep and dreaming are not synonymous,
and that the brain mechanisms involved in REM sleep may be entirely different from those involved in dreaming. Dreaming, in fact, is
now thought to recruit areas of the brain involved in higher mental functions.

In other words, dreaming does for the brain what Saturday-morning cartoons do for the kids: It keeps them sufficiently
entertained so that the serious players in the household can get needed recovery time. Without such diversion, the brain would be
urging us up and out into the world to keep it fully engaged.

"Dreams are a delusional hallucinatory state" driven by activation of the brain's basic motivational system, Solms told a
gathering of scientists in New York City. And like delusions, they appear to be stoked by an abundance of the neurotransmitter
dopamine.

Dopamine, scientists now know, plays a critical role in directing our attention. The neurochemical decrees what is salient in
our environment, regardless of whether that environment is inside us or outside. Under dopamine's influence, events or thoughts jump
out of the background, grab our attention, move us to act and drive goal-directed behavior.

Dreams trick us into thinking we're out striving in the wider world. "The fundamental problem of being alive is that we must
get all our needs met in the outside world," says Solms. The brain has an answer to that; it has developed a kind of unified
motivational force variously called the "seeking" or "wanting" system, an orchestration of primitive and higher neural structures that
orients us to the outside world with an air of anticipation and positive expectancy. As Solms puts it, "It's an all-purpose looking-for-
pleasure-in-the-world drive" that sends animals out to satisfy their needs.

Pioneering neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp describes the seeking system as a "goad without a goal" (goals, such as gathering
food, being dictated by the specific situation). It is a readiness for action, an appetitive arousal, the neurobiological descendant of
Freud's idea of libido. Representing a very basic function of the brain, it commands and activates an array of neural circuits.

Researchers mapping the functions of the brain have shown that the hallucinations of psychosis involve hyperactivation of
the seeking system's structures. They also involve dysregulated dopamine transmission. Increasingly viewed as "the wind of the
psychotic fire," dopamine prompts the brain to assign abnormal importance to its own internal representations. Delusions, in other
words, are errors of salience attribution. We overvalue our own thoughts, which are mistaken for perceptual experience of the world.

Dreams share many qualities with hallucinations. They are the hallucinations we all experience. Both dreams and
hallucinations involve intensive activation of the seeking system. And Solms points to accumulating evidence that dreaming, like
hallucinating, is driven by dopamine.

French neuroscientist Claude Gottesmann reported that dopamine release in the brain's nucleus accumbens, a site long
recognized to be involved in the hallucinations of schizophrenia, is maximal during dream sleep. "Dreaming and schizophrenia have
the same neurochemical background," Gottesmann says.

Other studies show that the dopamine-boosting drug L-dopa, commonly used to treat Parkinson's disease, prompts people to
have more dreams, more emotional content to their dreams and more bizarre dreams.
 Driven by dopamine, dreams fill our minds with myriad stimuli that feel worthy of our attention, says Solms. "That's
necessary because the body is withdrawn from the external world."

Goaded into seeking but blocked from action by paralyzing neurochemicals released during dream sleep, we feed on our own
internal representations of the world. And we wake hungry for new experiences that build our psychic cinema of internal
representations.

Says Solms, "The dopamine hypothesis is at the core of why we dream."

Marano, Hara Estroff. “Why We Dream.” Psychology Today. Marc/Apr 2005. 07 Jan. 2009

< http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20050420-000004.html>.
 Night Life
By: Jill Neimark

What happens when we dream? From nightmares to pre-cognitive dreams, psychologists give their takes on the various myths related
to this nightly activity.

Dreams are our built-in entertainment as well as a porthole to the innerworkings of our minds. New findings show they are a
form of creative insanity that the brain uses for everything from mood regulation to learning, memory, maybe even messages from
beyond.

Ten years ago, in New Mexico, I had a startling dream. I'd made an appointment by phone to see an acupuncturist, and the
night before my visit, I dreamed about him. "Listen," my dream-self said, "I'm still adjusting to the altitude here and need an unusually
gentle treatment, or I'll get sick."

When I walked into his office the next day, he was exactly the man of my dream, down to each fine detail of his wavy brown
hair and boyish face. I told him so, and he replied that he believed in precognition. He gave me a gentle treatment.

That dream was a small anomaly, but one that ripped opened my perspective: if in a dream I could know what someone
looked like before I actually met him, then the dreaming mind is capable of spectacular range. That is the only precognitive dream I've
ever had, but, like most of us, I've found my dreams to be deep and shallow, beautiful, nutty, mysterious, chaotic, and sometimes
meaningful enough to trigger big life decisions.

From the Australian aborigines, who believe that the dreaming and waking worlds are equally real; to Freud, who felt dreams
were a braid of repressed wishes; from Jung, who saw dreams as stories dipped in our collective unconscious; to Nobel prize-winning
scientist Francis Crick, who has suggested dreams are just the brain's way of forgetting, a sloughing-off of each day's meaningless
events; from the cognitive neuroscientists who have discovered that dreams and REM sleep are linked to our ability to learn and
remember; to those who believe dreaming is the meaningless and random sputtering of nerve cells, dreams are the sphinx-like riddle
we keep trying to solve.

Robert Stickgold, Ph.D., a Harvard neuroscientist, has his own fascinating description: "The mind becomes clinically insane
while dreaming." Stickgold says we're so comfortable with dreaming "that we don't realize how strange it is to lie in bed hallucinating
patently impossible things without ever noticing that these things might be impossible."

"You're delusional and hyper-emotional and you might even suddenly wonder, 'Is this a dream?' but nine times out of ten
you'll decide it's definitely real." Even stranger, Stickgold observes, is the fact that "for every person in the world, the same brain that
works one way during the day shifts into a completely different mode at night."

According to Stickgold, dreams are proof that "the mechanism for producing insanity is present in all of us." The only
questions are: "How do we throw that switch every night?" and "Why do we bother to do it at all?" He and others are now beginning
to sketch out some intriguing answers.

Do we dream to forget? Or to remember? The answer seems to lie in new findings about REM sleep and its unique biological
function. First, however, let's shatter a myth. Dreams and rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep are not one and the same. We dream
throughout the night, sometimes while in deep sleep—the sleep marked by slow EEG waves, during which the body repairs itself,
releasing growth hormone. REM sleep, in contrast, is a violently "awake" sleep; the muscles are at rest but the brain and nervous
system are highly active.

The brain cycles through REM sleep about four to six times a night, each time marked by irregular breathing, increased heart
rate and brain temperature, general physiological arousal, and, in men, erections. Arousal is such that ulcer sufferers secrete twenty
times more stomach acid in REM than in non-REM sleep.

The first REM cycle follows ninety minutes of slow-wave deep sleep and lasts about ten minutes. REM cycles lengthen
through the night and the dreams in them get more bizarre and detailed, like wacky movies. REM dreams tend to be uniformly more
emotional and memorable than non-REM ones. One of the most interesting aspects of REM sleep is that, for its duration, we are
paralyzed from the neck down, and our threshold for sensory input is raised, so that external stimuli rarely reach and wake us. The
brain is soaked in acetylcholine, which seems to stimulate nerve cells while it strips muscles of tone and tension. At the same time,
serotonin levels plummet. The changes are swift and global. It's as if during these cycles we are functioning with a different brain
entirely.

Because we are literally paralyzed while we dream, we do not act out our nightly hallucinations. Otherwise, we might
gesticulate, twitch, and actually stand up and play out our dreams. It's interesting that our eye muscles do not become paralyzed, and
researchers have speculated that nature did not bother to develop a mechanism to paralyze our eye muscles simply because eye
movement is a kind of gratuitous detail—it doesn't have much impact on the dreamer. Whatever the reason, REM has been a boon to
dream researchers, since it's a clear indication that we've slipped into that particular phase of sleep.

As the biology of dreams is being pieced together, the theories of Freud have begun to seem more improbable. Dreams are
likely not the eruptions of the repressed primal self, disguised in clever puzzles that only your psychoanalyst can decipher at $180 an
hour. The first blow to this theory was dealt in 1977, when Harvard's J. Allan Hobson, Ph.D., proposed that dreams are a kind of
narrative structure we impose on the random firing of neurons in the brainstem. The neocortex, our meaning-maker, creates stories out
of this neuronal chaos—just as it does of waking life.

Those stories may indeed be clues to our inner selves. But when brains are scanned during dreaming, researchers find that the
frontal lobes, which integrate information, are shut down, and the brain is driven by its emotional centers. Just last year, researchers
Allen R. Braun, M.D., of the National Institutes of Health, and Thomas J. Balkin, M.D., of the Walter Reed Army Institute, scanned
the brain in both slow-wave and REM sleep and found that during the latter, the visual cortex and frontal lobes were both shut down.
That deals yet another blow to Freud: if dream content were being monitored, with unconscious wishes being actively repressed and
disguised, the frontal lobes would have to be active.

What is the purpose of the neural chaos of dreaming? Scientists are still puzzling that out. In 1983, Nobelist Francis Crick, of
the Salk Institute in La Jolla, suggested that the brain was actually "reverse learning," that REM sleep allows the neurons to spew out
each day's spurious and extra stimuli, cleansing the brain. "We dream to forget," Crick wrote, to enormous outcry. In 1986, he revised
the hypothesis, noting that perhaps we dream to reduce fantasy and obsession—that dreams are a way of forgetting material that might
otherwise needlessly intrude on everyday life.

Then, in 1994, two researchers showed that our ability to learn seems dependent on REM sleep. Scientists Avi Karni and Dov
Sagi, at Israel's Weitzman Institute, found that if someone is trained in a task and allowed a normal night's sleep, they will show
improvement the next day. But if sleep is interrupted in each REM cycle, they show no improvement at all.

And the particular cycle of REM that gets interrupted is crucial. It's REM sleep in the last quarter of the night that counts.
Bob Stickgold trained 57 individuals in a task and then tested them 3, 6, 9, or 12 hours later the same day, or overnight after an
interval of 13, 16, or 22 hours. The task involved visual discrimination: a subject looks for diagonal lines against a background of
horizontal lines.

The time interval had no influence on performance; the amount of sleep did. "If they had less than six hours of sleep, they did
not improve," says Stickgold.

One might simply conclude that people need a lot of sleep in order to learn. The truth seems to be: they need certain cycles of
sleep, and when awakened before their last REM cycle, the brain is unable to consolidate the memory of the task. But Stickgold and
his colleagues found that more than REM cycles were at stake.

"A student of mine did another experiment and found that the amount of slow-wave sleep in the first two hours of the night is
highly correlated with the amount of learning as well." How might the two sleep cycles—REM and deep slow-wave sleep—work
together? There may be a two-step process of memory enhancement. "We know that levels of acetylcholine are high in REM sleep and
low in slow-wave sleep. Perhaps as you cycle from one to the other, you're passing information back and forth between different parts
of the brain. It's as if the brain is holding a conversation with itself and identifying exactly what it needs to know."

Stickgold thinks REM sleep may have yet another purpose: to actually alter intrusive experiences and memories from the
day. "I was putting my son, who is ten, to bed after a day of skiing together. We were lying there with our eyes closed and I said, 'I feel
I'm back on the ski slope.' He said, 'Really? I'm on the ski lift.'" There's a tendency to have an intrusive replay of novel experiences
when you go to sleep, says Stickgold, especially ones that involve the vestibular system of the brain, which plays a role in balance. "If
I fall asleep, go through one REM cycle, and wake two hours later, the feeling is gone. I can't reproduce it. Something has happened to
that memory in those two hours."

Stickgold is looking at this effect in people who play the computer game Tetris, which requires rotating small blocks that
float down the screen. "More than one person has told me that the day they first got hooked on the game, they went to bed, closed their
eyes, and could see these blocks floating. It's gone the next day. Something in your brain in that first two hours has taken a memory
that at sleep onset is incredibly intrusive and altered it so that it no longer behaves that way."

Rosalind Cartwright, Ph.D., the doyenne of dream research, has also found that sleep softens intrusive experiences, especially
depressing feelings and moods. Director of the sleep disorders service and head of psychology at Chicago's Rush Presbyterian-St.
Luke's Medical Center, she has evidence that dreams help regulate and stabilize mood, defusing negative feelings.

By observing sixty normal and seventy clinically depressed adults, Cartwright found that among those who had a mildly
unpleasant day or experience, dreams were negative at the beginning of the night and became pleasant by the end. Among the
clinically depressed, dreams were bland at the beginning and negative by night's end. "Normal individuals wake up in a better mood
after a depressing day," she says. "Depressed individuals wake up feeling worse."

Cartwright adds a coda: "I'll tell you the kicker: a few of the depressed people showed the opposite pattern. Their dreams got
more positive across the night. And those were the ones who got over their depression. You could predict it from a single night of
dreaming."

Dreams, Cartwright believes, are our "internal therapist"; they offer an emotional information processing system. When that
therapist isn't functioning—if, for example, you suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder manifested by recurrent nightmares—you
may actually be able to lend it some help. Recently, researchers in Canada have found that consciously changing your dream in any
direction while awake may stop the recurrence.

Tony Zadra, Ph.D., of the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory at the University of Montreal, studied six cases of recurrent
nightmares—"and all got better," he says. The technique? While awake, the dreamers were taken on a guided visualization into the
nightmare, and, at an emotional moment in the dream, were asked to visualize a simple task, such as looking at their hands. Then they
were asked to respond differently—say, confront an aggressor or otherwise create a positive outcome.

After rehearsing the new ending while awake, the dreamers go to sleep as usual. And then an interesting thing happens:
"Some people actually remember to look at their hands at the right moment, and then become aware that they are dreaming and that
they can consciously carry out their dream differently. Others don't remember to look at their hands, but they dream the new dream
they created while awake."

Either way, the nightmares stop. Says Zadra: "Some studies show that you can change absolutely anything in the nightmare,
rehearse that change, and the nightmare will get better." It's the change that counts—it dismantles the dream and pries loose its hold on
the dreamer.

It seems that dreams are many-purposed. They invite us into the truly interesting frontier of the mind. That may be why
Stickgold says, "I love dreaming. And I love dreams."

Neimark, Jill. “Night Life.” Psychology Today. Jul/Aug 1998. 07 Jan. 2009

< http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-19980701-000025.html>.
 How to build a dream
By: PT Staff

Analyzes the implications of dreaming. Brain activity; Comparison between men and women's dream patterns; Outcome of attempts
for documenting dreams' bizarre nature; Misconceptions about dreaming.

Dreams have no inherent meaning--butthey do have lots of emotion.

Somehow you overslept, and by the time you get to class, there's only 10 minutes left to finish to class, there's only 10
minutes left to finish the exam. More troublesome, though, is the fact that you're completely naked, and when you glance toward the
front of the room, it's not your math teacher standing there but your mother, chomping contemptuously on a fat Cuban cigar.

It's only a dream, of course. But it seemed so real, so vivid, so symbolic, that it must mean something. Freud, after all, argued
that dreams are the "royal road to the unconscious," our innermost thoughts unshackled from the confinement of our uptight, waking
self. Figure out what you dreaming mind i trying to telling you, said Uncle Siggy, and you'll achieve deeper self-understanding.

But moderm cognitive neuroscience suggests that Freud had it wrong, that dreams have little or no inherent meaning.
According to this new view, the images, objects, and characters in our dreams are not coded postcards from our psyche, but the
product of semi-random neuronal firings. And the bizarre plots and storylines of dreams merely reflect a desperate attempt by our
brain to some-. how make sense of this chaos.

Night Visions

Dreams are such a routine part of our lives that we often don't appreciate just how bizarre the very concept of dreaming is.

"The mind becomes clinically insane for two hours every night," Robert Stickgold, Ph.D., a Harvard neuroscientist, told the
American Psychological Association. "We hallucinate wildly, see and hear things that aren't there. We become delusional."

By tracing what happens in the brain during these hallucinations, and analyzing the content of dreams in objective ways,
Stickgold and colleague J. Allan Hobson, M.D., director of Harvard's Neurophysiology Lab, are helping create a bold new model of
dreaming.

Dreaming, they contend, is a bottom-up process. It's initiated by one of the brain's most primitive regions, the pontine brain-
stem, or pons.

Although many parts of the brain contribute to dreaming, one of the key players on the Dream Team is a pons region called
the FTG (the full name, if you must know, is gigan to cellular field of the tegmentum). FTG neurons spring into action as the brain
shifts into REM sleep, those nocturnal periods during which your eyes dart frantically from side to side and your dreams are longest
and most numerous.

Over the course of a night, most of us pass through four to six cycles of REM, each lasting 15 to 30 minutes. Just before a
REM cycle begins, the FTG sends bursts of electrical signals throughout the brain--and dream construction begins in earnest.

But before a dream has a plot, characters, or setting, it gets assigned an emotion, contends Stickgold. Some of those electrical
signals reach one of the brain's emotional centers, the amygdala, which "chooses" a mood or emotion from some mental menu.
Whether the proportion of each emotion that winds up in our dreams is somehow fixed in our brain, or whether the amygdala relies on
some emotional "thermostat" sensitive to culture and environment, isn't yet known.

If dreams are mirrors of our waking lives--or, alternatively, if they represent the emotions we keep pent-up during the day--
we would expect to see sex differences in dream emotions. That's because during the day, men and women typically report different
emotional states. Men are more likely than women to say they're angry; women are more often anxious or depressed.

But Hobson and Stickgold find that the emotional content of dreams is identical in both males and females. Fear and anxiety
dominate about a third of our dreams; another 15 percent involve anger. In all, about two-thirds of dreams are emotionally negative--
and they typically become more unpleasant as the dream progresses. It might be due to a kind of cognitive-emotional feedback:
Negative emotions remind the dreamer of negative thoughts, which leads to higher levels of emotional negativity.

A Terribly Awkward Position

Meanwhile, the electrical waves from the FTG also activate higher brain regions like the cerebral cortex. These are the brain
cells that supply memories and visual images, the nuts and bolts of dreams.
 But during REM sleep, low-level chaos occurs within the cortex, reports Steve Foote of the University of California, San
Diego. Neurons that receive the signal to fire somehow remain silent, while others go off for no apparent reason.

Technically, this chaos is called a decrease in the signal-to-noise ratio. But the practical upshot is a mishmash of images,
thoughts, and emotion that puts our association cortex in a terribly awkward position: It wants to tie everything together.

This may be why our dreams seem so bizarre, says Stickgold. "It is all that the association cortex can do to cobble together
some fantastic story line and try to keep up this chaotic melange of images and feeling."

Seen Any Object Transformations Lately?

The Harvard team has been attempting to document the bizarreness by analyzing the content of dreams in a scientifically
objective fashion---a harder task than might first appear. Part of the problem is, we can't rely on dreamers themselves to interpret their
own dreams because they will find meaning at every turn.

"The human brain is an association maker," observes Stickgold. "It will find associations between almost any two images
presented side by side or sequentially. It finds meaning in Rorschach ink blots, in tarot cards, in the arrangements of stars."

The trick, then, is to bring in objective observers. That's what Cindi Rittenhouse, then at Harvard, did when she studied that
most bizarre dream phenomenon, the metamorphosis of one person or object into another---so-called object transformations. She
arranged, side-by-side, lists of dream objects and the things they turned into, then asked judges to match one side of the list with the
other. Did the bag in one person's dream, for example, turn into a school bus, a beach, or a burlap sack?

The answer, not surprisingly, is the burlap sack. In fact, most of the transformations proved so predictable that a panel made
correct matches 94 percent of the time. Transformations, in other words, aren't random, but reflect object associations that most of us
would make.

But the same doesn't hold true of the location or plot changes that sometimes occur in mid-dream--"as if you were watching
TV and someone changed the channel," notes Stickgold. In one study, dreams with plot shifts were randomly spliced together with
others at their respective moments of scenery change. Another group of dreams was left intact. Asked to identify which dreams had
been spliced, judges chose correctly half of the time--exactly the rate of chance.

It's uncertain why transformations are so predictable, yet plot shifts aren't. But a clue may lie in a series of experiments where
Harvard researchers woke subjects from REM sleep and tested their ability to make associations between strongly related words--say,
cat and dog--and weakly related ones.

The newly awakened subjects made strong associations easily, more so, even, than they did during normal waking hours. But
weakly associated concepts were far less accessible than they were during their morning peak. Stickgold speculates that the
predictable, constrained object transformations in dreams reflect these easily made strong associations, while the bizarre plot shifts
may stem from our relative inability during REM to connect the dots between weakly associated concepts and images.

Yield of Dreams

So are dreams totally irrelevant to our waking selves? Can they tell us nothing about our lives, our thoughts and emotions?
Dream fans need not abandon all hope.

"There's no question that what's going on in your life has a powerful effect on your dreams," says Stickgold. If you've been
worried about losing your job, that's likely to turn up in some of your dreams.

But the reason has nothing to do with your subconscious trying to send you a message, he insists. It simply reflects the fact
that the neurons responsible for those thoughts and worries have been primed by their recent activity, made more accessible. Their
odds of being activated during the chaotic neural firing of REM rise.

Dreams, moreover, certainly reflect our personal history. "That's what your brain has to work with, your memories and
associations," observes Stickgold. "So whatever it puts together, no matter how clumsily it does so, is still drawn from that well."

The problem comes when people attempt to impose elaborate symbolic interpretations on a dream -- that a rose, for instance,
represents nostalgia for your lost youth, or that anything cylindrical has phallic implications.

"This sort of stuff is clearly nonsensical," Stickgold says. His take-home message: Find all the meaning you want in your
dreams -- but Understand that such meaning is constructed by our waking minds after the dream, not by some dreaming unconscious
beforehand.
 Perhaps it was frustration with such overwrought Freudian interpretation that led novelist Stephen King to offer his own
theory on dreaming. Its philosophy isn't all that far removed from what Stickgold and Hobson propose. And whatever it lacks in
delicacy, it more than makes up for in insight. "I think that a lot of times," King said, "dreams are nothing more than a kind of mental
or spiritual flatulence."

Psychology Today Staff. “How to build a dream.” Psychology Today. Nov/Dec 1995. 07 Jan. 2009

< http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-19951101-000037.html>.
 Myths about Sleep and Dreaming
By JLC

There are many myths about sleep and dreaming that a lot of people believe even today with all of the knowledge we have
gained in the world of Psychology. I chose to research three common myths and find out more about why people believe these myths.
The first myth I found interesting is the belief that everyone needs eight hours sleep. I think the reason I found this myth interesting is
because I didn’t know that it was a myth. I thought it was true like most people do. The second myth I chose is the myth that dreaming
of dying can be fatal. I have heard many times that if you die in your own dream you will actually die, but I didn’t think it was true.
The last myth I researched is the belief that it is easy to learn hard lessons such as a foreign language while sleeping. This is also
something I have always heard and thought about trying but never did. All three of these myths have been proven to be just that;
myths.

My whole life I have heard that you should get a full eight hours sleep. However, the proven fact is that while the average
amount of sleep people get is 7.6 hours a night, some people need as little as fifteen minutes of sleep. To the other extreme, some
people need as much as eleven hours of sleep a night. These two extremes are sometimes called short-sleepers and long-sleepers.
According to Michael Breus, Phd, D, ABSM, many factors play into how much sleep one needs. Some of these factors are your
inherited genetic gene, your sleep hygiene, such as drinking coffee, smoking, or drinking alcohol daily. The quality of your sleep is
another important factor in how much sleep you need nightly. If you sleep right through the night you may only need six hours of
sleep to feel good but if you have to get up several times during the night or are just awakened a lot then you may need more sleep.
You should wake up feeling pretty much refreshed and alert during the day if you are getting the correct amount of quality sleep you
personally need.

For example, if I get about six solid hours of sleep I feel like getting up in the morning and I feel pretty good all day long. If I
get woken up a couple times at night then I don’t feel like getti
ng up at all the next day and feel tired all day.

I was very interested in finding out more about where the myth originated from that dreaming of dying can be fatal. There is
no proven fact that dreaming of dying can cause a person to die. If a person has dreamed of dying and died during that dream, there is
no way for anyone to know that they died while having a dream about dying. There is a connection between the part of our brain that
controls vital life functions and with the dreaming part of our brain, therefore, contents of our dreams can set off the same reaction as
we have when we are awake. If you have a nightmare, your body may react the same way as if something bad was happening to you
when you are awake, but there is documentation showing that some people have had dreams of dying and lived to tell about it. For
example, in an article in the San Diego Reader by Matthew Alice he states that a man named Tom Saladino wrote that he had had a
few experiences of dreaming of himself dying and lived through each one. The truth is that many people have had nightmares and
woke up right before expected death in the nightmare. If you are screaming and your arms are thrashing you are bound to wake up.
The nightmares seem so real and intense that at some point it became a common belief that if you don’t wake up before you die in
your dream then you are a goner in reality as well.

It is a commonly heard myth or belief that people can learn difficult lessons while asleep, such as a foreign language. The
reality is that some studies show basic learning while sleeping, but nothing significant. Not much of the information is retained. A
good study was done at the University of Arizona in the Bootzin Lab. Recordings were played to both sleeping volunteers and awake
volunteers. Later, both of the groups were asked questions to see who remembered more of the words on the recordings. Direct and
indirect memory tests were given to both groups. The group who learned while awake did much better than those who “learned” while
sleeping. However, some studies do show that people can learn while sleeping, so perhaps it depends on the person and the stage of
sleep whey are in.

These “myths” were very interesting to explore and research. There are so many different beliefs and studies on each myth.
There are different findings and opinions everywhere. Sleep and dreaming is very mysterious and amazing. I suppose there is still
much to be studied and experimented and tested. People have been talking about their dreams since time began, and it is something I
am sure people will be discussing until the end of time.

JLC. “Myths about Sleep and Dreaming.” Associated Content. 19 June 2006. 16 Jan. 2009

<http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/38838/myths_about_sleep_and_dreaming.html?page=3&cat

=5>.
 The Five Different Types of Dreams
By Charlotte Kuchinsky
I have had two recurring dreams for as far back as I can remember. They sometimes vary in small details, however, for the
most part they remain the same.

The first one is strange in that I can view it but not myself. That means, that I don't have any idea how old I am in the dream.
In fact, I have no real conscious idea of my own body. In many ways it is as if I'm viewing the dream remotely.

The dream takes place on the porch of my grandmother's house. It's a beautiful sun shiny day in late spring. The air is crisp;
not too hot and not too cool. The sky is a stunning vivid shade of blue. There isn't a cloud in the sky, yet I see a huge rainbow that
seems to span the length of my field of vision.

As I watch, totally in awe of the beauty of nature, I sense that my body is beginning to shake. I have no reason for the thought
since I can't see my body. However, the concept is clear in my mind. Then I realize that it isn't me that is shaking, but the earth itself. I
remember thinking it odd since, as a rule, we don't have earthquakes in Oklahoma.

As the ground begins to split open, panic sets in. Yet I cannot move. I'm glued to the spot. Then as I watch, in terror, balls of
fire begin falling from the sky. I remember thinking that they look very much like the scene in "The Ten Commandments" when God
rained fiery hail down on Egypt because the pharaoh refused to let His people go.

With that thought, I always wake up. I've never gotten any further in my dream. I have no idea of its ultimate conclusion. I
only know in my heart of hearts that I don't really want to know how it ends.

Because of this and another recurring dream, which I'll share with you later, I've always been interested in the meaning of
dreams. It is a fascinating subject with a wide variety of theories.

Some people believe that dreams are a link to the deepest recesses of our psyches, but few experts totally agree on their
purpose. Some say that dreams are a way for us to problem solve while we sleep. Others say that our dreams try to give us knowledge
about our lives - - past, present, and future. Still others suggest that our dreams have no meaning at all.

The one thing on which most dream analyzers do seem to agree is that they have significance. The trick is determining
exactly what the significance truly is.

Over the next few articles, I intend to share information about dream analysis and some of the most popular and well-
respected theories about the meaning of dreams. To begin, let's start where we should, at the beginning.

There appear to be many different types of dreams. Some even combine together to make the dream more difficult to
understand and infinitely harder to analyze. In the purest form, however, dreams can be put into five categories of dreams:
Aspirational, astral, liberating, problem-solving, and psychic.

Aspirational dreams deal with our internal wants, desires, and wishes. For example, a young girl who fancies herself in love
with her current beau, might have a dream where he asks her to marry him or she might even "view" her own wedding in elaborate
detail.

Although similar in nature to psychic dreams, aspirational dreams don't always deal with reality and might not even flow in
any kind of orderly pattern. Because an aspirational dream deals with our imagination or fantasies, they don't have to make perfect
sense.

Aspirational dreams might end with us achieving a desired goal or they could show us why something we desperately want
might not be the right choice for us. Sometimes, they end abruptly without any definitive conclusion.

Astral dreams are sometimes remembered but just as often forgotten as soon as we awake. These are the dreams where we
generally meet with friends and family who have already passed over. According to many new age believers, it is also the time that we
spend with our spirit guides; strangers that we only recognize in our dream.

The purpose of Astral dreams is for us to gain assistance from those in a unique position to see the big picture, while we can
only deal with where we currently are and what we want. Astral dreams tend to have a logical order, unlike the wild and often
confusing situations involved in other types of dreams.

There are no limits with regard to time or space in an Astral dreams. For this reason, we will often choose a location that we
always wanted to visit or someplace where we have always felt safe for the background of our dream.
 Generally, the people we pull into our Astral dream will be happy; happy to see us; happy with their after lives; happy in
every respect. For this reason, Astral dreams are almost always quite pleasant.
And, although we might not remember it, once we awake we automatically have an answer to whatever question or situation was
plaguing us prior to the dream. It's like our thoughts are suddenly crystal clear with the right decision.

Liberating dreams serve a very important function. They help us to get rid of fears, insecurities, and frustrations that we can't
seem to deal with when we are awake. These regrets, worries, and concerns are often buried deep inside our subconscious and, for that
reason, we might not even recognize them as issues in our daily lives.

Liberating dreams are almost always confusing. They happen in a non-logical way. Like pieces of a puzzle before they are
put together, these issues flow into our dream in no particular order.

Liberating dreams also generally involve some form of denial. That is often expressed in the dream by running away from
something we fear like a tiger, a bear, or even an imaginary monster. Sometimes, we can even call them nightmarish because they
force our conscious mind to deal with something that we can't, or won't, recognize when we are awake. That deep seeded fear,
therefore, takes on an evil form.

In truth the creature or monster we are attempting to escape from is actually ourselves. Until we become willing to deal with
that part of ourselves that needs help or repair, there won't be an escape from the monster we conjure up in our dream.

Problem-solving dreams are pretty self-explanatory. If you have ever gone to sleep with a problem on your mind, only to
wake up with the perfect solution crystal clear, then you have experienced a problem-solving dream. This type of dreams is the way
for our sub-conscious to get through to our conscious mind.

I've often woke up in the middle of the night with the perfect ending to a piece I have written or recipe with which I was
struggling. These types of dreams are very common even if we don't realize what they are.

Psychic dreams almost always happen in sequential order. Unlike some of our other dreams, which can be either in black and
white or color, psychic dreams are always in the brightest, most vivid colors that we can imagine.

Oddly enough, you don't have to be intuitive to have a psychic dream. Of course, if you are, it might help you better
understand the experience.

The purpose of psychic dreams is generally to deliver a warning. Sometimes the dreamer receives enough information to deal
with the warning once they awake. Other times, they might only be aware of feeling of discomfort or uncertaint fear that only
crystallizes when it must finally be faced.

For example, I once had a dream about a car accident in which a little red Pinto was crushed by a semi truck. At the time, I
didn't know anyone who owned a Pinto, much less a red one. However, shortly after the dream occurred, I became fast friends with a
co-worker at my new job. One day, when my car wouldn't start, she volunteered to drive me home. You can imagine my surprise when
she led me straight to her little red Pinto.

Most of our dreams actually serve a viable purpose. Once we understand what they are trying to tell us, we can use them to
achieve both short-term and long-term goals. The trick, of course, is figuring them out and that, my friends, is the subject of my next
article.

Kuchinsky, Charlotte. “The Five Different Types of Dreams.” Associated Content. 20 Sept. 2007. 16 Jan. 2009

<http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/376698/the_five_different_types_of_dreams.html?cat=34>.