[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Dreams
Dreams have fascinated and perturbed human beings since time began. When scientists discovered REM sleep and learned that dream experiences are connected with it, a new era in dream research opened up. But scientists often use strict, reductionist methods to interpret their findings, and where dreams are concerned this can lead to oversimplification, a danger that dream research has not always successfully avoided. When we speak of dreams, the first thing that tends to come to mind is the presence of unusual and fantastic events in them.
In our dreams we encounter people who have been dead for years. We suddenly find ourselves in far-off lands. Animals speak to us, and we ourselves possess powers that would strike us as completely impossible in waking life. If someone were to tell us that he had similar experiences when awake, we would doubt his sanity.
The dreamer finds himself in surroundings that often change abruptly, although sometimes a change of scene occurs more gradually. Scenes and people from our past appear. Obviously the laws of space and time are suspended in dreams. Another important trait of dreams is their riveting nature. Our attention is captured by certain events or objects, from which we cannot free it; we cannot choose to direct our thoughts to something else. The American sleep researcher Allan Rechtschaffen made the paradoxical but correct observation that dreams are lacking in imagination. When we dream, our mind does not wander, as it does when we are awake.
The dream's images fill the dream entirely, and no room remains for other "reveries." This "single-mindedness" of dreams accounts for that peculiar feeling that dreams take place in a self-contained world of their own. Although other people appear in them, we feel fundamentally alone and cannot communicate our experiences to anyone else. We are entirely in the grip of the experience, unable to reflect on it or evaluate it.......
