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Have you ever had a dream that really upset you? Maybe you didn't even think that you were dreaming and some terrible thing happened to you in your sleep? There are those that believe that you can have a dream that is so terrifying, that it can kill you. There are also others that think that this is not possible. Dreams have been thought of as harbingers of bad things, they have also been thought of as prophetic in some cases. In ancient times people thought that dreams foretold the future and you can see references to this even in the bible. There were even cases where curses were put on people's dreams to get even with them for some perceived hurt. Dreams have been at the center of things for quite a long time. When man was even more superstitious than he is today, dreams took on a much more positive or negative role in someone's life.

The Knight's Dream
Photo Source: Public Domain

Today we are advancing so much that the unthinkable has happened concerning dreams. A Japanese research team now claims that they have created a technology that they believe will eventually be able to display someone's dreams on a computer screen. This means that they will be able to be recorded, just as we record a television program today. This technology will probably spread to the consumer market and there will be a time when we will be able to record our dreams for viewing later. Many of us do not remember our dreams or even dreaming. Some psychiatrists say that this could be a protective measure in some instances. If we are going to view what we have forgotten, it might not be the best thing for us in certain circumstances. Imagine seeing long lost friends and relatives walking and talking. That may not be so bad, but now imagine these people doing horrible things to you or you doing it to them. This could be far worse than viewing a slasher movie. Will a whole new industry spring up where certain people that have a history of certain types of dreams will be paid to dream and the recordings that are made of their dreams sold as movies? These things would be almost all profit.

Some people have used dreams to predict the future and one in particular did it with some accuracy, his name was Edgar Cayce, also known as the sleeping prophet. His prophecies fill thousands of books. While they were not all 100 percent accurate he did achieve a remarkable success rate and some can not be proved or disproved yet, such as the age of the Sphinx. Cayce never charged a fee for his predictions that he did while in a sleeping trance, which lent even more credence to the fact that he said he did them to help people. Some say that as he kept increasing the time he spent with people making predictions, that is what eventually killed him. He was said to have been overworked.

Alarm Clock
Photo Source: MorgueFile

There are plenty of places that claim to offer dream interpretation. You would first have to believe that dreams really meant something, before bothering to have them interpreted, otherwise what would be the sense? I personally do not believe that dreams are anything other than our minds displaying a scenario of jumbled thoughts while we sleep. It is said that the typical dream lasts from 5 minutes to about 45 minutes. Some people have reported that they had a dream and it came true. This doesn't really mean much in the scheme of things. Many of these types of reports are of things like job promotions and such. They are right out of someone's subconscious. It is simple to explain these types of dreams. If a person is being considered for a promotion for example, they may already know that they are a candidate and dream that they were promoted. The thought of promotion is already firmly planted in their subconscious and this is hardy a prediction. There are exceptions to everything however and there have been some dreams that seemed to predict events before they happened.

A British psychic is said to have predicted the 9/11 attack on a television show before it happened. Valerie Clarke was taking part in a Kilroy program about dreams. She told of a dream, or vision she had that an explosion took place in one of the twin towers. She went on to state that when the event happened, her blood ran cold. This was said by a BBC spokesperson, "During the first show she said she had dreamt about a plane crashing into a tower, When she described the dream in greater detail it turned out to be the World Trade Center." Admittedly it is hard, if not impossible, to know what was the process that allowed this prediction to come about. From time to time some people experience dreams that seem to be warnings and this was one of those times. These times are far and few in between, but they do seem to happen.

Sleeping Baby
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One woman awoke out of a dream covered in sweat. She had dreamt that she was being operated on for cancer. The dream upset her so much that she went to her doctor for a checkup. In the course of taking routine tests, she was found to have the disease, but it was in the early stages and easily curable due to where it was. She credits that dream for saving her life.

Freud told us that dreams were the expressions of the dreamers deepest fears and desires. A scientist named Calvin S. Hall collected over 50,000 dream reports at Western Reserve University in over forty years from the mid 1940s to 1985. He along with another scientist Van De Castle published “The Content Analysis of Dreams”. What is interesting about this book was the fact that it showed that people from all different parts of the world dreamt of the same things. They also found that the most common emotion found in dreams is anxiety. Wow I know that I have had that a few times and I am sure that many of you out there have had it too. This is the kind of thing you get when you dream about walking out on the steel structure of a building being built, or when you dream that you are being attacked.

Some say that we need to dream, others are not so sure and still others claim that they don't dream anyway so they don't care about dreams. The fact is that they do dream, but they just forget the dream. Maybe something could be learned from this, such as how to make our mind forget certain things that are unpleasant or painful. Anyway, we will continue to dream to the day we die, so happy dreams to all.