Context / Dreams
We experience a dream as real because it is real … The miracle is how, without any help from the sense organs, the brain replicated in the dream all the sensory information that creates the world we live in when we are awake.
-William Dement
Just as no one completely understands why we sleep or what exactly happens while we sleep, the world of dreams is similarly a mystery. There’s much disagreement about the purpose of dreams: are they random firings of the synapses, exercises for our brain somehow related to memory, or a window into our psyches?
To read more about different theories and some of the science behind dreams, visit some of these great links:
Dreaming is, above all, a time when the unheard parts of ourselves are allowed to speak.
-Deirdre Barrett
Dreams and Fairytales
(Excerpted from Psychology and Fairy Tales by Carrie Hughes)
Psychoanalysts have turned to fairy tales in an effort to understand the human mind. Freud suspected that dreams and fairy tales stem from the same place, and the relaxation of inhibition that occurs in the dream state is also true of many story tellers. Fairy tales are inextricably linked to the work of Carl Jung who believed that all human beings share a “collective unconscious” which is revealed through archetypes found in ample evidence in fairy tales. Jung’s disciples have gone on to interpret fairy tales as lives in miniature, suggesting, for example, that each character within a tale may represent an aspect of personality.
