Dream

a procession of images or fantastic ideas passing through the mind while one is asleep. Roughly speaking, there are three theories of the dream. According to a belief quite prevalent among savage people, the soul or mind leaves the body during sleep and travels abroad in the world of spirit, meeting with the adventures and experiences which we call a dream. It is said that, to the American Indian, a dream is as real as his waking experience.

A second theory is that of supernatural origin. According to this theory, a dream is a communication from the other world,--a hint which the dreamer does well to interpret and heed with care. In Greek mythology the gods frequently spoke to the heroes in their sleep. At the instigation of Jupiter Aeneas was warned by Mercury in a dream to remain no longer at Carthage. In the scriptural story of Joseph, the dreamer of dreams, we have an excellent illustration of this theory. He dreamed that his brothers' sheaves bowed down to his sheaf, thus forecasting the time when his brethren bowed themselves before the great man of Egypt. The chief butler in prison dreamed that he gave the king to drink again. This actually came to pass. The chief baker dreamed that he carried meats on his head and that the fowls of the air came and ate of them, thus foreshadowing his death. Pharaoh dreamed of the seven fat kine eaten up by the seven lean ones, and of the seven full ears of corn devoured by the seven blasted ears. By interpreting this dream, Joseph was able to foretell the seven years of plenty followed by those of grievous famine.

The third theory of dreams is to the effect that a dream is an action of the mind produced either by some sort of mental excitement, such as trouble, worry, something that one has read, or heard, or seen; or else that the dream arises from some condition of the body, as cold, hunger, or some other form of bodily discomfort. An imaginative child, who has heard or read Indian tales of massacre and burning, not infrequently dreams of passing through similar scenes. The child's sufferings are, for the time, quite as keen as though they were real. Such dreams as trying to run against a strong wind, leaping from a housetop, and the like, are due usually to some uncomfortable position of the body, or to an overloaded stomach. A cold foot may cause one to dream that he is tramping through a snowdrift. Almost everyone dreams, even from the earliest infancy, and can draw upon his own experience for illustrations. They are usually, however, of greater interest to himself than to others.

One of the strangest features of dreaming is the immense amount of experience that is packed within a few moments. Events that would occupy hours of waking time may be crowded into a few seconds. One falls asleep and dreams of traveling for hours, holding long conversations with various persons, passing through all sorts of adventures and bodily discomforts or pleasures, and awakes to find that he has napped but a moment or two. Some authorities even go so far as to assert that all dreams, however lengthy, take place at the very moment of waking; but there appears to be no solid foundation for this statement.