“The dream is an involuntary art of poetry”
– Jean Paul Richter
Dreams are a significant part of our lives. According to Ernest Hartmann, a leading dream researcher, we spend 5 to 15% of our lives dreaming. Dreams offer a glance at the deepest parts of our minds. They allow us to learn more about ourselves and can bring about an enormous amount of insight.
Many famous people have made great discoveries in science and art that were based on dreams. Examples include Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing machine. When developing the idea of the sewing machine, Howe couldn’t figure out how the machine would catch and tie the thread from the needle. He then had a dream that solved the problem. In the dream, he was a missionary who was being caught by natives. As the natives were threatening him with their spears, he noticed that there were holes through the tips of the spears. When he awoke from this dream, he realized that in order to make the machine work properly, he needed to place a hole through the tip of the needle. Another example is Giuseppe Tartini, an Italian composer and violinist, who wrote one of his famous sonatas from a dream. He claimed that the devil played the piece on a violin in a dream. Upon awakening, Tartini simply transcribed the music. Robert Louis Stevenson also reported that the inspiration for his novel, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, came from a dream.
Not only have dreams been the source of inspiration for the arts, they are also important after stressful events. Dreams tend to become more frequent following stressful situations and can be more intense. Painful or difficult experiences can intensify our dreams as our minds are trying to process the complexity of emotions that we feel when bad things happen. Dreams offer a safe place where the mind can explore and integrate feelings and memories resulting from difficult experiences. They may actually help us deal with stress. A study by Deirdre Barrett in 1993 found that people who dreamed about a problem they were having believed their dream contained a solution to the problem.
Dreams speak to us through stories. They are made up of stories that our minds create to tell us something and help us deal with the struggles of life. Dreams contain stories and images that symbolically represent thoughts and emotions that we are not completely aware of in a conscious way. According to Carl Jung, the images in dreams represent aspects of ourselves. The characters, scenery, and objects in dreams are metaphors for something psychological in the dreamer. Paying attention to dreams and exploring them in therapy can offer such a meaningful way to learn more about ourselves and help us deal with the stress of life.
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