Dreams – Dream A Little Dream

Dreams are adventures into the fantastical, limitless realms of imagination and the unconscious mind. When you get into bed, wrap yourself up in the duvet and drift into a deep state of sleep, you find yourself on a journey into the unknown every single night. Research into dreams have identified that everybody dreams, it is just that not everyone can remember that they were dreaming.

The most intriguing question behind the nature of dreams and why we dream is “How do they work?” or “What causes them?” The truth is no one knows the full answer to this question. The mind is a deep, labyrinth of mysteries and secrets. What is known is that dreaming can be the most amazing, surreal, enlightening and telling experience a person can have. Interpreting them has been of great interest, musing and philosophising over the centuries. People may have even seen the most recent interpretation of dream states in the box office movie hit, Inception.

If you want to dream more, or be more aware that you are actually dreaming, one of the keys to accomplishing that task is to have the right sleeping environment. That often and very obviously permits getting a decent bed in order.

You need comfort, durability and space. If your bedroom is cluttered then so is your mind. Psychologically, a messy room is bad for your mental health where as a clean, well-kept environment, free of distractions such as computers and televisions, creates a serene, relaxing area that the mind can take-in without dilution or disturbance.

Try to tailor the bed you sleep in to be the right fit and size for your body, shape, and weight. Consider if you need a spring coil mattress or a featherbed. Do you suffer from back pain, in which case an orthopaedic bed would be required? Do you have allergies? If so, you would need to make the bed and all the pillows hypoallergenic. Do you have the right headboard? Is the headboard adjusted correctly so that it doesn’t hurt your head while you sleep? Know yourself, identify your needs and manipulate your bedroom to create a stable, peaceful and comfortable environment.

Once you have accomplished this, you should be able to not only get a good night’s rest but also drift seamlessly into a more focused dream state.

People often wonder about the nature of nightmares and ask if there is a way to prevent them from occurring. Nightmares are effectively just bad dreams through a cloud of intense unconscious extremities. The nightmare can often be so intense or severe they cause a quickened pulse, increase of sweat, heightened anxiety and sometimes even wake the dreamer up. The nightmare can originate from physical or psychological catalysts. Illness and medications can stimulate anxieties and fears that manifest in the unconscious, but more often than not, nightmares are merely reflections of stresses, pressures and/or traumas that you experience in your daily lives. The only possible way to effectively neutralise a nightmare is to confront the fear, or face-up to the anxiety or stress within the nightmare. It takes discipline and an upbeat attitude before and during your sleep, but a trained, focused dreamer can conjure up pleasant scenarios and emotions simply by thinking positively. This is the most successful technique to combat against nightmares.

The only way to encourage such an attitude is to start in the physical world by addressing the problems with the materials around you such as your bed, your sleeping environment and then to train yourself to think positively before going to sleep.

Dreams are mysteries wrapped inside enigmas and riddles, and the only way to fully appreciate or in some ways understand them, requires psychological and physical control. You can start by sorting your way through the outer world and eventually working towards sorting your way through the inner world. These two places exist and relate to each other in a concurrent synchronicity that only you can master and tailor to your sleeping needs.