Climbing Naked

"Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before." -Edgar Allan Poe

Do dreams really have meaning for us? Have you ever wondered why you dreamed of flying to some far off place only to find yourself climbing a mountain naked? Can those dreams really be turned the reality of goals and achieved?

We all know that dreams come in many different types; from the fun and enjoyable to the scariest and disturbing kind. The eight most common dream themes are;

Processing Dreams - rehashing of the events of your day; in other words "sleep-working." It is a way for our subconscious to digest the bazillion bits of information we are exposed to all day.

Venting Dreams - nightmares where you're being chased, falling, or failing a test. Think of it as a way to work through issues in a safe place, your mind.

Integration Dreams - dreaming you or someone else is behaving in some extreme way that you either greatly admire or seriously judge. It could be that the behavior you are judging may be something you are afraid to embrace or secretly dislike.

There are also recurring dreams, precognitive dreams, prophetic dreams and wish-fulfillment dreams. One that some people seem to have quite often are "Breakdown or Breakthrough Dreams." These are dreams containing the bad stuff such as a disaster, death, lions, tigers and bears, oh my! These tend to be indications of change on the horizon, but can be quite scary to say the least.

You know, Edgar Allan Poe had an uncanny way of pulling some of his own darkest dreams into the light of day. He turned those dreams into words that told stories to excite and scare us at the same time. He was a poet of his dreams.

Many people dream of similar things without ever having read the works of Poe. We have the content of our dreams that could be turned into something more. Even the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud said that whether we intend it or not, we are all poets. That is because on most nights, we dream.

While dreams are truly amazing, can we be the poet of such a wonderful thing? I believe it is possible, if only we could remember them after waking up. But how do we explain these dreams or understand them? What makes a dream real such that we can create a poem for our lives?

There are different theories in the scientific community to explain what these dreams are. In one called Evolutionary Theory, we dream in order to practice our responses to threatening situations. Those dreams where we are naked in public, being chased or fighting off some unknown thing; theorists believe we are practicing our fight-or-flight responses.

In yet another theory, dreams are thought to create wisdom. With the vast amount of information coming at us while awake, there is too much to process. As the theory goes, while sleeping we are better able to sort through those memories. This in turn allows our brain to determine which ones to retain and which to lose. To put it another way, we are getting smarter while we sleep.

A third one indicates that dreaming is like defragmenting your computer's hard disk drive. Think of the brain like a machine that gets in the groove of connecting its data in certain ways and some of those connections or pathways are not always the most useful. When we go to sleep, the brain works in a much more random way. The randomness of the brain activity searches and creates new connections.

Other thoughts suggest that dreams are like psychotherapy. During our waking hours, we experience a flood of different emotions throughout the day. But how do we learn to deal with those emotions. It is theorized that dreaming places those more difficult emotions into pictures for us. Dreams are a safe place to work through those emotions.

A last theory is really an absence of a theory. Maybe dreams have have no meaning at all. Dreams could merely be the random firings of a brain that doesn't happen to be conscious at that time. Those left over remnants of a dream that the concious mind remembers and is what the concious mind trys to make sense of.

So if you find yourself dreaming of running naked, flying with a birds eye view of the world or dreaming of climbing without knowing why, your brain may or may not be trying to tell you something. Dreams in the unconcious mind can impart new and fresh ideas into your concious world. Those dreams can create new ideas and new goals for your life. They are pathways into finding lost information within our minds.

There is a large amount of information to absorb in our "awake" world. But there is a whole world of information that exists inside our brain. Dreams can give us access into that world every now and then. It is in that discovery, can we find a new way of moving our lives forward with the help of those dreams? Why not turn those dreams into goals?

When that happens, you just might find yourself flying to some far off land and climbing a mountain naked. You just never know.

Stay inspired my friends!