To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

I had a few comments on my last post about dreaming. Some have generated thoughts that I wanted to mention. Whatever your belief is, and I don't disrespect them at all, there is strong evidence among those who have dreams that they can be prophetic. Stories go back beyond modern times. I am a believer by default. I've had dreams and they happened. You don't have to believe me. I didn't ask for them and wouldn't wish them on my worst enemy. But whatever else I know, I know that dreams, sometimes, are predictive or prophetic.

I also know that equally, some dreams are nothing but our over exerted minds. At other times, they are our brains way of working out problems. Ever hear the expression, "I'll sleep on it"? That did not come about by accident and it is a very old expression. The mind never sleeps. It is constantly working to make sense of all the information it has been bombarded with all day.

I used to sew everything my family wore. There were many times when I had a troublesome item that needed a special solution. If I couldn't figure it out, I'd put it aside. When I went to bed that night, I would do a little trick. I'd tell myself that I was going to dream of the solution. It never failed. I learned that trick over time and I used it to very good effect in college. Always before a test, after I had studied and when I went to be at night, I would repeat that I knew the material, I would remember it the moment they gave me the test. I've taught others to use this technique and it does work. Your mind is powerful and I suspect the unconscious mind is more powerful than the conscious mind, with all its barriers and inhibitions.

May father told me once that he could control his dreams. I questioned him on this. He told me that he loved skydiving and hated falling dreams. If he had a dream of falling he had taught himself to change the dream and instead of falling, he was flying. I too hate falling dreams and so after he told me that, the next time I had a falling dream, I tried it. And it worked. That is called lucid dreaming and there have been studies to show that we can manipulate some of our dreams. After all, it is our mind.

As for predictive dreams, there are many people, thousands or more, who will tell you they have dreamed of events prior to their happening. We aren't psychics. We are generally average people. I do not understand what purpose it serves because usually people don't believe you anyway. Would anyone of you have believed me if I had told you that I dreamed of my grandmother dying that it was going to happen? No. You would have laughed or reassured me. But it did happen. Two weeks after the dream.

I dreamed what my oldest son looked like before he was born. I didn't even know he was a boy. Coincidence? Maybe. How can I tell? I have a lot of dreams that happen.

My grandmother had premonitions and dreams that happened. She just never talked about it. People think you are crazy, back then, even more so. She never told me about them but I knew she had them. She would say things were going to happen and when asked how she knew, she just looked away and said, "I just know." And they did. Then, we would ask how she knew and she wouldn't tell you. Well, I don't have her fear of being thought crazy. But I have kept this to myself for decades. No one in my family knew this about me until recently, when I told it after Jerry died. My aunt said, "Mama could do that." Mama even knew about her own death. And so did I. I didn't believe either one of us until after the fact.

Do you know how frightening that is? I've had death dreams three times. They all involved family members. I only acted on one of them. That person did not die. I acted because the nature of the dream was unusually and profound and frightened me so much that I acted immediately on waking. The other I missed - one because it was the first one and the other because I simply wasn't expecting it.

To sum up my point here I want to refer you all to the last paragraph in the January 12th post. Gloom, Doom and a Working Day