"Have you ever wondered why we dream? The answer is different for each one of us who asks the question. Dreams are as simple or as complicated as the dreamer. The reason I dream is because I discovered long ago that dreams can be ever so rewarding and that dreams represent the one place where I can get all I want.
Whether I was a young boy, teenager or elder, my most common dream involved me rescuing fair maidens from a horrible end. As a child, I would be Wild Bill Hickok, sneaking up on the imprisoned beauty who was waiting to be burnt alive at the stake, freeing her, making off with her on my swift steed and living happily with her forevermore. Not often, but occasionally, the rest of the Indian tribe would spot my attempt to free their prisoner and would shower us in arrows as we fled. I would sometimes wake up in a sweat with an arrow through my throat!
Then there were my romantic dreams, which mostly occurred during my teenage years when my testosterone brain was constantly wanting what it hadn't yet had and told my body that it would die if it didn't get it soon. In those dreams, I would be walking along the street one night and come across a group of six youths teasing and assaulting a defenceless young woman. In my dream, I would politely warn the yobs to leave the young woman alone and when they laughingly turned on me with a variety of flick knives, determined to do me damage, I would wipe the floor with all six and leave arm in arm with the woman I'd saved as her attackers grovelled in the dirt.
I often wondered if it was a coincidence that in my dreams during earlier life, I always played the role of 'rescuer.' In my occupations that followed, it could be argued that I continued in that role, as I attempted to rescue the people with whom I worked from lives of hopelessness, helplessness, debauchery, crime, depression, poor health and perceived insignificance and impotence!
Having been a relaxation trainer for over fifty years, as well as having benefited personally and in my profession from the power of imagination techniques, I now see dreams as being an extension of one's daily imaginations. It is my firm belief that all dreams matter, and believe me, when you are happy in a dream, the pleasure and satisfaction is as good as it ever gets and it still counts!
I also strongly suspect that people who achieve great things in life are often to be found among life's dreamers. I look not for the hidden messages in my dreams. If secrets lie in wait to yet unfold, I am perfectly happy to await my destiny.
Often I have heard of people who have horrible dreams and who even fear closing their eyes on a night when they hit the pillow. I often consider such people to be life's pessimists; the ones who awake each day expecting another day of bad things awaiting them in ambush, instead of optimistically anticipating the good day that lies ahead. That is why dreams can either be the cut of life one lives or the slice of death one fears.
For those who look for the concealed messages of their dreams, I'm afraid that like all the Freudian followers, they chase shadows in the dark. They may arrive at some satisfactory conclusion why they still fed from their mother's breast at the age of three or why they continued to use their potty until they were five years old, but they will never acquire the enlightenment they seek regarding graver and more significant consequences of development! Wiser folk have sought to unravel the dreams of another, believing that an uninterpreted dream is like an unread letter that was never written. That, is what I believe Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, tried to do.
I am now 73 years old and one might think that my dreaming days are over, but believe me, they're not. What I am likely to experience these days in my dreams is an amalgam of people who have filled my life, involved in inexplicable situations they never entered into. These days, my dreams often mix up my past experiences and the natural sequence of events that took place in my life, involving real people who are inaccurately placed in the plot. I even wonder sometimes, if it signals the onset of Alzheimer's condition. I can place people in their wrong abodes and have them do things they would never do in the light of day or in a month of Sundays. Then, two seconds after I've woken up, I've forgotten what I dreamt, whereas one time I could have written it down or remembered it all day long, had I wanted to.
One cannot find the cause of yesterday's problems in today's dreams, but if you simply go along with the dream you dream tonight, you may experience answers to some of tomorrow's questions. My late mother was one of life's romantic dreamers and although the totality of her travels never stretched beyond Ireland and England, it never stopped her dreaming of those far away places she would love to see, yet knew she never would." William Forde: August 16th, 2016.
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