We all dream. Sometimes we dream of having a good time with people we love, of a repetitive, traumatic memory turning into a nightmare, or sometimes of an unrealistic setting with a surreal presence. The variety of dreams forms our unconscious mind and speaks of our nature. A world-renowned psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung told the truth of dream that reflects our subconscious in his book, <Memories, Dreams, Reflections>: “A dream shows the reality and the truth of a patient’s inner state. Not the shape of an analyst’s guess, nor an appearance he wants to be shown, it shows the intact inner shape as it is.” Then what kind of dreams do we have? Let’s learn about dreams we have every day but differ every night.
1. Lucid Dream
A lucid dream is a type of dream where people know that they are dreaming. In a lucid dream, the dreamer can control it to some degree, and do whatever he or she wants in it. There are techniques necessary for having a lucid dream. According to <High-Level Control in Lucid Dreams> announced in 2020 by SAGE, the main methods for a lucid dream are mnemonic induction, reality testing, and autosuggestion. Through RC (Reality Check) you can find out it is a dream, and you can set an alarm every 5 hours and wake up to remember what dreams you were at through the artificial process called “mnemonic induction.” Also, you can be conscious of a dream through ‘autosuggestion’, meaning self-hypnosis. In effect, doctor Denholm Aspy conducted a successful MILD (Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams) research among 169 people, and 53% people succeed in lucid dreaming. Through this accessible lucid dreaming, artists can get inspiration again by dreams, or people could release stress by doing things they normally can’t. Also, people can control the direction of a dream in any way they want, which makes the happy emotion continue even after waking up.
However, there are not only positive effects of lucid dreams. When people want to feel happy inside and induce a lucid dream on purpose, they can go through mental instability or further stress disorders. According to the report from Health Kyunghyang in May 2022, professor Lee Yoo-jin of the Department of Psychiatry at Seoul National University Hospital warned of the side effects of lucid dreaming. She said, “In particular, some of the methods for inducing lucid dreaming use methods such as waking up and then putting them back to sleep, which can interfere with natural sleep and cause insomnia. It can cause not only mood problems but also symptoms of sleep paralysis. When stressed out, people can feel better by having a lucid dream. However, it seems that relying too much on lucid dreams can cause negative consequences.
2. A Good Dream and a Bad Dream
A good dream is a dream interpreted as an auspicious and lucky sign. When you dream of good things and find out the interpretation that it is a good sign, your day would be energetic and positive. In contrast, a bad dream makes you feel that you would confront a damaging and ominous event in a near future. There are hypotheses about the validity of a good and bad dream. For example, like the old saying, if you say out loud that you had a good dream last night, its efficacy will stretch out through the day. However, when a hearer interprets the dream with a bad meaning from his perspective, or is jealous of the dream, the effect would decrease. Additionally, selling a good dream might be another option.
Long ago in the Silla Dynasty, there was a girl named Bo-hui. Bo-hui sold a dream to her sister Mun-hui. The dream was about her peeing on the top of the mountain and the urine was so massive that it created a flood. Shortly after, Munhui, who interpreted the dream as auspicious bought it from her sister, and she became the wife of the 29th king of Silla Dynasty, Kim Chun-chu. From Bo-hui’s point of view, she sold her lucky dream and lost an opportunity to become a queen! On the other hand, rather than focusing on whether it is a good dream or a bad dream, the way people perceive the dream is more important. You should note a Chinese idiom “hyung-mong-dae-gil” (凶夢大吉), meaning that the dream acts as its opposite when you have a nightmare and if anything, you would face an auspicious event. Putting it nicely is better than dreaming itself. Let’s not be alternately happy and miserable just from our dreams. There are a lot of other things to consider!
3. A Premonitory Dream
A premonitory dream is “a dream that appears to give advance notice or warning of some future event.” People who dreamt a premonitory dream may think that they have received a divine revelation through the dream, so they also call it a visionary dream. It usually guides people in a good way and objectively shows an immoral action to teach them it is unethical. Also, the dreams often appear as a warning to people to prevent and get away from some risk. A classic example of a premonitory dream is a case of Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the United States of America, who told his guard Ward Hill Lamon about his ominous dream 2 weeks before he was killed. He said that he was covered with a shroud in the East Room of the White House and among people crying, a person told him that the president has died. 2 weeks later, the president was killed while watching a play in a theater. Scientists tried to define a premonitory dream scientifically but failed. In 1927, there was an abduction case of a renowned pilot’s son, Charles Lindbergh. Henry Murray, a psychologist at Harvard University, tried to solve the kidnapping case by utilizing premonitory dreaming. However, participants of 1300 people dreaming a premonition brought no information about the kidnaping. Although the scientific clue of the dream has not been discovered, it occurs to a few people’s brains and research in this field is drawing attention. Julia Mossbridge, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, felt that a premonitory dream should be seriously researched in 21st century.
A premonitory dream and déjà-vu are similar in terms of having a feeling that is “already seen.” While people see a future already in a premonitory dream, déjà-vu is “the feeling that you have already experienced something that is actually happening for the first time.” The fact that both phenomena share the common point of experiencing a situation in the past blurs the difference between the premonitory dream and déjà-vu. However, the distinction becomes clear when it comes to the moment of realization. When you face a déjà-vu, you recognize that the situation feels familiar. However, you are aware of the future event before it happens when you experience the dream. You can change the future when you have of a premonitory dream because you ‘know’ the future, on the other hand, you can’t affect the present and the future when you feel déjà-vu. Déjà-vu is not a dream, so don’t be confused about these terms!
In a dream, we can experience things that can’t happen in real life. We can become a dragon or achieve our greatest desires and ease our stress when dreaming. There are many types of dreams; lucid dreams, premonitory dreams, good dreams, bad dreams, and more. The phenomena related to dreams are also various. The more you sleep, the more you dream. CAH hopes our readers to sleep tight and have healthy, auspicious dreams!
