Dreams Essay Research Paper Dreams We go

Dreams Essay, Research Paper

Dreams

We go to sleep every night and wake up every morning. I’m sure we can all remember having some sort of dream and wondering about it’s meaning. We can’t really explain what went on in our minds but we still search for some meaning. Some times these dreams bring good sensations, and sometimes bad ones. I’ve heard many things about dreams. My friend once told me about a television show she saw. It was about dreams. I immediately became intrigued because they always amazed me. She told me that there are four stages of sleep. She said that you begin to have dreams when you get to the fourth stage, and at that time you are in the deepest state of sleep. Once during the summer while at the mall my friend and I were walking around and checking out all the cool stores. Suddenly I glanced at a shelf of books, journals, and dictionaries of dreams. I picked up a dictionary, and began to flip through the pages. Soon I realized that I had a dream that boggled my mind a couple days ago. The dream was mainly about snakes, so I looked up snakes in the dictionary. It said that some one I’m very close to would betray me, so I glanced at my friend and told her that she was going to betray me, but she told me that wasn’t the case. We went on with our rampage through the stores, but in the back of my mind I still remembered what I read about my dream. A few days later I got in a fight with my mom because she criticized how I looked, and that looked like betrayal to me. From that point on I began to wonder if dreams could predict the future, but I wasn’t exactly sure. Are dreams really prophecies from the mind, or just some thing going on in your head that’s completely unexplained.

Many people believe that dreams have no special meaning. But dreams are prophetic, and have the ability to let us peek into the future. Throughout much of human history people have been fascinated by dreams. The entire fates of some religions were shaped through prophecy, and dreams. Native American tribes such as the Yuma, and Dakota believe that dreams are messages of the future from the gods. Ancient Egyptians have similar believes about precognitive dreams, and hoped gods would forecast the future through dreams. There were some more modern discoveries, about dreams, made by J. W. Dunne, who performed a couple of experiments in the field of dreams, resulting in the conclusion that dreams anticipated future events. Another important influence on dreams is Edgar Cayce, a prophet, who also believed in the predictive power of dreams. People have prophetic dreams all the time, and I have found many examples of these dreams.

Shamanism, Judaism, and Christianity are three examples of religions that are influenced by dreams. Shamanism is “an ancient practice that honors dreams”(Mossdreams). There are two types of dreams “ordinary dreams and big dreams” (Mossdreams). Big dreams are messages from our guardian, and are very realistic. According to the shamanic way of life if you receive this type of dream especially if it’s a bad one you should “just go through the motions in a very simple way to get it over with” (Spirit online). You should do this because you don’t want the event to really happen and hurt you or someone else. In Judaism one of the main ways God communicated with his people, as stated by the Old Testament, was through dreams. The Bible has many examples of people from Israel receiving prophetic dreams. For Jews these dreams opened the road to the future, by showing it to them. James Lewis said that in the Jewish religion to derive the proper meaning of dreams, Jews must interpret them (32). The Old Testament also states that Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph where the most prolific prophetic dreamers. Another interesting fact is that their dreams had parallel themes. Prophetic dreams received by Joseph became the building blocks of Christianity (Innes 18). The birth of Jesus was prefigured in a dream (18). When Joseph and Mary were about to get engaged, Mary had an unexpected pregnancy (Innes18). Later an angel came to Joseph in a dream and told him of the child’s destiny (18). Soon after Jesus was born Joseph had another dreams, in which the angel told him to take his family and move to Egypt to stop King Herod from killing his son, and only to return after Herod’s death (18). God told Joseph of the future in this dream. If he didn’t to so Christianity may not exist today.

Many Native American civilizations believe that what you see in a dream is something very close to what is about to happen in reality. The Yuma are one of the tribes who strongly believe this. The Yuma regard dreams as the basis of their religion and traditions, believing that they begin before birth and are more real than waking experiences (Innes 24). This is true because when we sleep we don’t have to deal with the problems of waking life. On the word of James Lewis, the Kamia, a neighboring tribe of the Yuma, the knowledge of destiny of the human soul can be derived from dreams (167). He also said that the Dakota interpret dreams as prophetic messages from the spirit world (168). Hirsch stated that some Native American send young boys away for a period of fasting a prayer when they are supposed to receive precognitive messages of their future (22). They are sent to a secluded place without food or water, to have visions of their destiny, which will help him/her find their path