Dreams and Reality

It's been suggested that ancient man sometimes had trouble distinguishing between reality and the dream world. It's possible that when the "gods" told him to go plunder and pillage, he was simply, in a very real sense, "thinking out loud".

Most of that internal debate has been ended. The brain of modern mankind, usually, has a firm grip on reality. Except when we sleep. Sleep can still be the playground of “what if’s.” No barriers, no limits, it is what you imagine it to be.

Most of us don't keep track of our dreams, though maybe we should, since dreams are supposed be symbolic. Sometimes revealing our deepest self or our supra-consciencesness. The people who study these sorts of things have come up with some statistics about dreaming.

It seems that most of our dreams focus on individuals. Only 30% of the dreams recorded have a large cast and the choice of characters is important. We generally include ourselves in just about every dream. Men tend to dream more often about other men. In fact, as they get older, men tend to dream about men three out of four dreams. It's also interesting to note that more than half the time we dream about strangers or at least people we don't know in our waking state.

We also keep emotions out of most dreams. But when they creep in, worry takes the lead. We seem to expect problems more than we anticipate joy. 40% of the time, the emotion remembered in a dream will be fear. Happiness trails behind at 18%.

There are some who say that dreams are only a reflection of what we are. If only 18 percent of our dreams are happy and 40 percent deal with our fears, maybe it's time to change our thinking.