By Ali Pizza

Dreams, as defined by Merriam Webster, are ‘stories that a person ‘watches’ or appears to take part in during sleep.

-Freud – Wish fulfillment -Cartwright and Lambert – An opportunity to work out everyday problems -Hobson and McCarley – Simply the byproduct of bursts of activity emanating from the subcortial areas in the brain.

Through brain wave studies and behavioral observations, scientists have concluded that amphibians do not sleep, reptiles may or may not sleep, and birds and humans display two different stages of sleep. Scientists also have gathered that while some people may or may not have senses such as taste, smell sound or touch in each dream occurrence, most dreams contain visual imagery.

- G. Heermann in Studies indicate that when considering the age of the onset of blindness, five is the general cutoff point for the experience of visual imagery in dreams.

Mesopotamians, 2700 B.C. Sumerians record the epic tale of Gilgamesh where dreams are important to what will happen in the future. Assyrians were said to have three different classifications for dreams; Message dreams, mantic dreams and symbolic dreams

Egyptians – 2000 B.C. Chester Beatty Papyrus III – Named for Chester Beatty, the man who donated the document to the British Museum Hebrews – 500 B.C. -Messages from God. -Angels and Demons could influence dreams -In dreams, the soul travels.

Chinese – 1000 B.C. T’ung Shu life almanac contained seven categories of dreams, each dealing with different aspects of life. Indians – 1500 B.C. Atharva Veda was a sacred book of wisdom that the Indians used to interpret meanings in dreams. Also believed that the time of night the dream occurred related to the time of realization in waking life.

Greeks – 700 B.C. – 130 A.D. Points to be considered come from many sources. Homer, Aristides, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle and Galen were among the most prominent. Much of the next 1500 years or so, not many new ideas or new concepts developed. Mostly old ideas were expanded on or manipulated to fit the researcher’s ideas. The years after Jesus Christ

The Dark Ages – A.D. -Dreams were demonized by well respected Church figures such as Macrobius and Saint Thomas Aquinas -Dreams were considered to be demon-inspired with the exception of dreams sent by God -People who repeatedly had dreams that contained ‘Unholy Nature’ were burned alive or tortured -Since only prophets or holy patriarchs could receive dreams from God, this left people with a crippling stress of trying to decide whether dreams were demon-inspired -Let to the practice of suppressing dreams for most people

As quoted from Dr. Robert Van de Castle, by the eighteenth century, dreams are “Finally liberated from the centuries of shackles imposed on us by the black-frocked inquisitors.” Sigmund Freud – Interprets dreams as a source of unconscious desires, mainly sexual interpretations Carl Jung – Interprets dreams not so much as scientific interest but as maintaining and restoring mental health. Each dream requires its own set of rules for interpretation Alfred Alder – Asserted that the absence of dreams indicated good mental health.

-REM sleep phase – dream relationship -Brain wave patterns -External Stimulus Physiological connections to dreams -Physiological connections to dreams

Frida Kahlo – The Dream

M.C. Escher Waterfall

Salvador Dali – The Persistence of Memory