The Dreamer's Dictionary [antikvár]

IntroductionrI ^rom time immemorial dreams have been regarded with an inter-X est transcending mere superstition. Their cause and their meaning have been the subject of study and investigation by learned men throughout the ages. The many references to records concerning dreams which turned out to be "events casting their shadows before them" can leave little doubt as to the importance of dreams in history.What are dreams? Well, through the past centuries, dreams were defined as "states of consciousness occurring during sleep." We inherited this nebulous and paradoxical definition before the rise of physics; but since the mid-nineteenth century a great deal of scientific research has been done to try to establish more clearly the nature of dreams.Dreaming certainly belongs to our most intimate experiences. Generally, during waking hours, our reaction to our experiences is mainly emotional. In our dreams it is even more emotional because dreams are a concentrating agent for our various subjective motives. They also constitute an interrelation between the now, the past, and the future of human experience. In our dreams we create a world where space and time have no limiting power. In his fascinating book An Experiment with Time, Professor Dunne proposes the theory that all the time that is now, has been, or will be is like a river, and that you can navigate this river, forward, backward, and presumably sideways, in the vessel of your dreams.Herder, the German philosopher, states that dreams are but the ideals of all poetic arts, while Jean Paul Richter, another German author, thinks that dreams are involuntary experiences leading to the composition of poetry. Both these writers concur with other great ones of the past, such as Nietzsche, Kant, and Novalis.F. W. Hildebrandt wrote in 1875, "Dreams help us to inspect those hidden depths of our existence which are mostly beyond our reach during our waking hours. Dreams bring us such refined insight into self-[7