Exactly what are dreams? We all have them, everybody knows what a dream is but very few people understand the mechanics behind dreaming and the real reason that we do dream. Now I don't pretend to be a medical expert although I've studied up a little bit on what they have discovered in some of their experiments that they've done in sleeping and in dreams so I can share some common knowledge that is out there but what I hope to share with you now is a look at some things that perhaps you've never heard taught before and never fully understood and if you can come to understand exactly how the dream mechanism works and why you dream the way you dream then I think you're going to be in a better position to know when and how you need to actually interpret your dreams and so as we go on further later on we'll look at actual dream interpretation and show you how to interpret your dreams but first let's start by looking at the dream mechanism itself. Firstly why do we sleep? Dreams only take place during sleep.

So why do we sleep? Well the first reason that we sleep is so that our bodies get time to recoup and strengthen themselves. Our bodies need a rest from all the effort and everything that we've done during the day. That is one of the reasons we sleep but actually it's not the main reason that we sleep.

Our sleep also gives our souls a rest not just our bodies and during the sleep process what actually takes place is an optimization of our inner mind. That little thing that the psychologists call the subconscious mind. There actually takes place an optimization, a rearranging, a restructuring within that realm of us known as the subconscious mind.

Now dreaming is natural and it's common to all men and dreaming takes place every night in everyone. Now I know I can hear somebody saying immediately now but I never dream. Not true.

Everybody dreams. Sometimes we remember our dreams. Most of the time actually we don't.

But according to medical statistics they say that you dream at least two and a half hours per night in a normal dreams in a normal sleep cycle. So everybody dreams every night or if you have long afternoon sleeps as I do you may also find yourself dreaming during the day. Point is we dream during our sleep.

Now natural dreams are similar to visions but they're not the same. They're different to natural visions and you remember we looked at natural visions and spiritual visions and then we looked at supernatural visions and we going to we're going to take a similar look at dreams and so we're going to start on the bottom rung with dreams just as we did with visions and we start by looking at natural dreams. Now natural dreams are a little bit more detailed than natural visions.

They're actually more like trance visions because of the fact that we have no external input coming in at all. We're not consciously awake at the time we have these dreams and so they're like a trance vision in that we're taken totally out of our circumstance and put wherever the circumstance is that the dream is taking place. Okay but they're a little bit more complicated a little more detailed but here's the important thing natural dreams do not need to be interpreted.

I'm going to say that again natural dreams do not need to be interpreted and I'm going to go into a lot of detail and spend a lot of time explaining this to you because you're going to find out by the time we finish that a lot of the dreams that you have that you thought you needed to interpret actually do not need to be interpreted at all. It's going to make the whole dream interpretation process a whole lot simpler for all of us. Now let's look at why we dream and let's look at some of the main kinds of natural dreams that take place.

Firstly I want to look at the actual sleep process. Now it's a known fact that there are different levels of sleep. The very deepest level of sleep which is usually the one that we go into initially to bring our bodies to a place of rest.

It's a very deep sleep and our bodies probably are the closest to death at that point. Everything slows down and is really just on idle. Everything has gone down to its minimum so that our body can fully recoup itself.

Now during the deepest cycle of sleep no dreaming takes place. So we go down into a very deep dream cycle and I believe that usually lasts about an hour or so and then we begin to come up into higher levels of sleep, less intense levels, less deep levels of sleep. And as you come up into those higher less deep levels of sleep something begins to take place.

Now physically as viewed from the outside in watching somebody who is sleeping a physical thing begins to take place which they call rapid eye movement. They've noticed that when a person goes through these cycles their eyes begin to move. Very quickly.

Now the same kind of thing can actually happen when we're awake and it happens particularly when we face a situation where we have to make a sudden decision or we need to do something. What actually happens is our conscious mind does a quick inner look. Now if we look at the way we structured this.

Now I've drawn two pictures here. I've drawn a picture of the human mind or brain and I've showed that there is the conscious mind and there's the subconscious mind. Now last time I explained that this is very much also like a computer.

And so if you look at a computer, a computer has working memory known as RAM or random access memory and it has a storage area. And in that storage area we have data and we have computer programs that are stored there. And what happens is when we want to run a program we have to load it off the hard disk into the memory and then it runs in the memory.

Now it works exactly the same in the way God has made us as human beings. What we keep in our conscious mind is the part of us that's running our lives, that's helping us to make our decisions and do what we do day by day. But periodically we need some extra input from somewhere.

For example you face a situation and you're not sure what to do. Who do you turn to for advice? I'll tell you where you turn to. You turn to your inner mind.

You go down in there and you say have we faced the situation before? Are there any similar circumstances to this that we dealt with before? Do we have any knowledge stored there that I can use? Now this takes place in split seconds. There comes a quick inner referring. Is there something there? And the subconscious mind will bring something back into the conscious mind.

The conscious mind will assimilate that and put it together and say okay this is what we're going to do. Now this happens to us all the time when we face situations where we have to make decisions. Now I'm going to be explaining later how templates work but effectively what happens is all of our experiences of life have been stored in the subconscious mind and when we face circumstances in life we go back and we look for similar circumstances, similar events from the past that took place to see if we can learn something about what we did back there and and how we responded back there and see if we can do the same thing again.

Okay now when that takes place even while we are awake there comes a very similar thing in the eye to rapid eye movement. So when a person is sleeping and they're dreaming and a rapid eye movement is taking place what is in effect happening is while they are asleep something is happening. An interchange is taking place between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind while we're asleep.

Something is taking place. Okay now I'm not going to go into too many complex details on that but as I explain the rest of the process to you'll see where I'm going with this and what I'm trying to explain. Now it's known fact that during rapid eye movement if a person is woken up they will usually be aware of the fact that they were dreaming.

Now for those who sleep pretty deep during the night and go through various cycles of rapid eye movement and then back down again you may wake up later on and when you wake up you didn't wake up during one of those rapid eye movement cycles and you won't remember that you've dreamt but you actually have dreamt many times during the night and gone through those rapid eye movement cycles. Okay so that is the process that actually takes place while we are asleep. It's absolutely essential to our sleep for one very important reason and this is the main reason that we sleep apart from the fact that our bodies need physical rest.

Our dream sleep especially is the time during which we are getting rid of all the stresses that we picked up during the day. Sleep is a stress relief process. Okay so during dreams during sleep we are getting rid of all the stresses of the day and we are rearranging our psyche.

In other words we rearranging this subconscious storage area if you like we rearranging our hard drive. Now it's not so common these days in some of the older computers especially under windows we had a program called the defrag which is a defragment process and the idea was that a whole lot of data has been thrown on this hard disk all over the place and it's all scattered everywhere in a in a kind of state of confusion and when you try and access that data your computer has to look all over the place for it. So the idea is to pull it together into some sort of consistent format to lay it out systematically so that when you look for data that's all of a similar type it can go one two three four five six very quickly and they'll be close to each other.

Okay that is a process of defragmentation or what they call disk optimization. Now the same process takes place when you are asleep what's happening is you are actually optimizing defragmenting actually doing a lot more than that as I'll explain shortly but you're rearranging the subconscious mind. Now what's happened during the day is you have taken a whole lot of information in a whole lot of information throughout the day and all that information has gone from your conscious mind has sunk down into the subconscious but it's gone down just if you like into like a temporary folder.

It's just sitting there waiting for you to decide what you're going to do with it. Now when do you decide what you're going to do with it? While you are asleep that's when you decide what you're going to do with it and so during your sleep what happens is all that data that you've accumulated during the day is now being arranged and we're saying okay where does this belong? It belongs in that folder over there because there's other very similar data over there to what happened today so let's put those all together so that they're all in one place and so it's taking the data it's searching and saying now what other data we got is similar to this it goes and finds the days oh yes there's something that's very similar yes let's put this in that slot over there and then we create an index to it. You see our memory works very much like a computer storage when you try and remember something from the past you need a kind of a trigger or an index something to look for.

You see now if I were to say to you I want you to think back around about the time that you were in your early teens or during your childhood I want you to think of the worst fight that you ever had with your mother the worst conflict that you ever had it comes back to your memory now I've given you a index to look for see now you got a lot of memory back there you got years and years of it but I've told you to look for something very specific see that's a kind of an index and so you will go down into your mind and if you think about it for a bit out pops something that you haven't thought about for years oh I remember that time I remember that time when my mother treated me so badly and we had this big big fight and we never talked to each other for weeks whatever the case okay there's many things in our memory and we have to get that data optimized and arranged in such a way that we can get it out but you see the data of our memory includes a lot more than facts it includes feelings it includes the things that we saw that we tasted that we touched that we smelled all of our senses and it includes all of our emotions and what we felt and and what we did and everything associated with events that took place during the day so when this rearranging is taking place there's a lot more involved than simple data simple events simple things that you can record in a diary there's feelings involved there's emotions involved and there's stresses involved now all of this takes place while you are asleep and that is what's taking place during that phase which they call rapid eye movement now how long should you sleep well the minimum you should sleep is enough for your body to get its physical rest firstly but that's actually not very much it's a known fact that people who have who've been on a on a job that require it demands a lot of time or students that have been studying at university very often will go with less sleep people have been known to lie there with like a pen in their hand and then just lie there and as soon as they fall asleep the pen falls and hits the ground and then wakes them up again and they have these little snatches of of sleep and they found that that's enough to take them through but if you keep that up eventually you're going to reach a place where all of these stresses and all this data hasn't been fully coped with you may have got enough sleep to give your body the rest that it needed but you didn't get enough sleep to re-optimize the inner man okay so how long should you sleep as long as what it takes to relieve the stress that means you got more stress you're going to sleep more now you will notice this you'll notice that if you've been going through stressful experiences in life you find yourself just wanting to sleep now you may think there's something wrong with me i'm just sleepy all the time i just want to sleep no no your body is giving you a signal saying there's stuff there we need to deal with there's stuff lying there that we need to optimize we need to get rid of the stress we need to rearrange you need to sleep as long as what it takes for that to happen otherwise you're going to have a problem and the problem that'll actually happen is that if you don't get enough dream sleep you will find yourself needing to dream while you are awake and it's a process that creates hallucinations psychologists have given it all sorts of terms like schizophrenia and and and mental illness but actually sometimes all it is is that you didn't have enough sleep of that rapid eye movement type to re-optimize all the data and get rid of all the stresses all of this is needed in other words you didn't dream enough dreaming is very important okay now let's look at this process of optimization that takes place while we're sleeping let's see how it actually works okay this data has all been accumulated if you like and it's been put into this temporary folder you know you you have this on your you looked on your hard disk and seen there's a folder called temp okay all this data has been put in there temp and it's saying we're not quite sure what to do with this data yet but we're sticking it all in there in one spot okay now if you let your temp folder get a bit too big eventually you're going to be overwhelmed with all this extra data and not know what to do with it so that's why every night or every day or whenever your sleep cycle is we're going to clear the temp folder okay now what happens when we do that okay firstly we're going to modify the programs that actually run the brain when you experience things in life some of what is stored down in year is something that affects your programs now if you look and compare it with a with a computer on your hard drive of your computer you have data stored but you also have programs stored and those programs actually can be configured and very often there is configuration data that is placed in a program that says how are we going to run the program sometimes you go and change the configuration to make the program run a little bit differently now your brain is like a computer and it has programs to run remember i spoke earlier about that when we face a situation our conscious mind reaches down to see if it can find something from the past now i've coined these templates i've coined the name templates and actually i got this word from my own knowledge of computer programming the templates are actually a term that is used in computer programming so we could actually call these if you like program templates they're sometimes a bit like the configuration they tell the program how to run and sometimes they have little program routines in in in modern times the kind of programs that run now are sometimes called scripts if you know a little bit about programming like php or cgi or some of the the modern languages javascript all of them they write a load of text a script and when that script is loaded into the computer it runs a program routine it does something well a lot of what happens when you experience things in life creates these scripts if you like in the subconscious mind little things that your brain will look for when it faces different circumstances and say let me run that script there and just load it in and run it and it'll happen without you even thinking it'll take place in split seconds well you would have even had time to think what you were going to say or do you would find yourself responding and acting in a certain way and afterwards you think oh why did i do that you will find your emotions suddenly changing the entire content of your soul suddenly is transformed almost instantly as a result of you facing a certain circumstance in life okay i call that a trigger a program template has got triggered your brain found a little script there that it could run and it ran it instantly and before you know it you found yourself responding and feeling in certain ways that you couldn't explain because you can't remember the memories from the past but they've stored there ready and waiting to come out okay now what happens while you're asleep during the dream cycle is you are actually creating new templates if they're needed or you're taking existing templates and you're modifying them now in the early years of life where we haven't experienced everything that life has to offer there are no templates there yet we come with a clean slate so you'll find that children when they dream are actually creating brand new templates based on the experiences that they had during the day when you come into the adolescent years of puberty and the early teenage years you're facing new stresses that you never faced before you're now between childhood and adulthood you're in this awful transition stage that creates a lot of stresses and a lot of new experiences you never ever had before and brand new templates are created during that phase and it's actually mostly in the early development years of childhood and in the adolescent years that how main templates are formed now later in life you may face a circumstance that you've never faced before in your life and when you do then a new template may be created but usually by the time we get to a certain age we've just about lived to experience everything that this world has to offer so your templates are formed but now as you experience new things all the time those templates have got new data that has to get added to them now i like to think of of a program template as being a chain the very first time that event took place the first link in the chain was formed now the next time you had a similar experience we added another chain and another one and another one now how are these chains formed they're not only formed when we actually experience these things but during our dream sleep all of those events are taken and they are slotted in to where they fit when did i experience the similar thing before where did i have a very similar situation and it goes and it connects and a new link is formed in the chain and your template is modified it's changed from what it was before all of this takes place during our dream sleep now we've got to get rid of emotional stress and it must be resolved before we wake up if it's not resolved you're going to find you want to still sleep have you ever had a long sleep longer than usual and you wake up feeling guilty because you slept so long but you feel like going back to sleep again and you say that's nuts i've slept hours i surely didn't i wasn't physically tired when i went to sleep i really haven't done anything physically challenging why does my body need all of this sleep it's not your body that needs the sleep it's your mind that needs the sleep because there's so much stressful data there that hasn't yet been optimized still got stuff sitting there in the temp folder it's taken a bit longer than usual to get rid of this because there's so many different places that it had to go so many different things that needed to get rearranged now if you don't and you get up and go through your day you find yourself incapable of coping with the stresses of the day because you're still carrying yesterday's stresses if you do this over a few days and if you lose sleep for two or three days in a row you have two or three days of stress accumulated and eventually you find that you cannot cope you can start manifesting symptoms of dementia and people are going to say you're going mad you start seeing things that don't exist because your body is trying to make you dream while you're awake so your sleep is very important not just the fact that you sleep but the fact that you dream during your sleep so dream as long as you can okay now what happens what happens when you're actually asleep we say the conscious mind doesn't it is no longer conscious because i'm asleep but it's not true your conscious mind actually is still very much awake even though your body is asleep what's actually taken place is your senses have been turned off so that you're not getting any more input coming in from the outside you're not seeing hearing tasting touching smelling none of that's coming in in fact there's a mechanism where your body actually cuts off the nervous system while you're dreaming because if it didn't you actually start to act out what you're dreaming so when you're dreaming what actually happens is your mind is very much awake and alive and actually an interchange is taking place between your subconscious and your conscious mind and a lot of things are happening right there now where does the data come from can't come from the outside it's been shut off there's only one place it can come it comes from the inner the inner man okay now dreams take place in your conscious mind they do they take place in the normal mind and that's why when you're dreaming you feel like you're not like a normal person awake you're living in a reality it's not it's an un it's a false reality but to you while you're dreaming you feel like you are awake you feel like in a normal situation now why is it that we don't remember what we dream because when your dream is finished the conscious mind is cleared it's like a computer while a computer is switched on there's data in the ram but the moment you switch the computer off that data dies away and disappears and all that you have left is what's been stored on the hard disk but what would happen if you were to suddenly switch off the computer and catch it just before it died that's kind of what happens when you wake up while you're having a dream while you're having rapid eye movement sleep the conscious mind is fully active and if you are woken up during that phase what happens is your nervous system kicks back in all the external things come back in but in that instant the dream the entire activity of your mind is still there it's still sitting in your mind and you remember exactly what you dream you say oh i woke up with this thing in my mind you woke up with the dream in your mind because you woke up while your mind was still actively involved in this process of rearranging the data and going through the process of a dream now when that happens especially if somebody has woken you unexpectedly in the middle of a dream you might have this kind of experience you might say i didn't finish the dream i i feel i feel like my dream my dreams incomplete you shouldn't have woken me sometimes you're having a nice dream you didn't want it to end whatever it is you sometimes wake up with a sense of frustration and a sense of unfulfillment that your dream isn't complete now when that happens you'll find that very often you can go back to sleep again and pick up where you left off have you experienced that you go back to sleep and you carry on the dream and the dream may carry on for hours may may carry on all night because there's so much that needs to be arranged so you go back to sleep again and you continue your dream again and again and again until the process of optimization and rearranging is complete until all the stresses are gone and they're over and now only you're ready to wake up face the next day because your dreaming is now complete now we're going to look next at different kinds of natural dreaming so you can understand exactly the kind of dreams that happen and why they happen and how this optimization process during the dream actually manifests itself into different kinds of dreams and so next time i'll be discussing different kinds of natural dreams

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