Who Needs Sleep?

What is the Importance of Dreaming?

What is the importance of dreams? Even in the past they've had an effect on people. "For thousands of years, people believed that dreams originated from somewhere outside of us. They believed that the strange images encountered in dreams were either the result of our souls leaving our bodies during sleep or of visitations from gods delivering messages and prophecies" (Recio & London 6). This is even used in the Bible, some examples being in the Book of Judges, Gideon had a prophetic dream about defeating the Midianites, and in the Book of Matthew, the Archangel Gabriel visited both Mary and Joseph in a dream about Mary's pregnancy. It doesn't seem to relate that God sent messages through dreams in the Bible and that during the Middle Ages "in the West, the Roman Catholic Church relegated dreams to the realm of devils and demons" (Recio & London 8), but dreams have always been an enigma, and people tend to be scared of what they don't know, so they would claim that dreams were evil.

Nowadays, people generally see dreams as a bridge between the subconscious and conscious minds, and a lot of people like to try to interpret their dreams using dream dictionaries. Some dreams are extremely vivid and some are very frightening. Everyone dreams, and dreams have inspired various movies and books such as "Vanilla Sky" directed by Cameron Crowe, "An Insomniac's Nightmare" directed by Tess Nanavati, "The Wizard of Oz" which was based on L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and directed by Victor Fleming, "Dream Saga" written and illustrated by Megumi Tachikawa, and Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass."

According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, a dream is "a series of images, ideas, etc., occurring in certain stages of sleep" (217). However, modern science has proven that dreams can occur in both Rapid Eye-Movement and Non-Rapid Eye-Movement stages of sleep, and not just some stages (Recio & London 12).