Stress Causes Dreams

Whatever we do lays a seed in our deepest consciousness, and one day that seed will grow. - Sakyong Mipham


Dreams are taken by psychoanalysts as the outcome of the preoccupied mind. If one is an obsessed chess player, he may find the coins stumbling in his dream and himself losing, if he had lost unwittingly a winning game in the recent past. The same is true with all people involved in actions- both mental and physical.

Coleridge was said to have written down the lines he got in a dream – Kubla Khan, which he himself called an opium influenced reverie.

Stress causes dreams. Ambition, expectations, anxiety, fears are all not just reasons for stress alone but also for dreams. I know the person who attended the funeral of his grandfather at the age of three. For years he had dreams of his grandfather laid out covered in a red cloth.

The fevered mind is the cause for such dreams. The stress might not show when one is awake. I had known a woman whose daughter died delivering a child. For years after that until her own death, she used to weep and cry out loudly in sleep, bereaving her daughter’s death. During daytime, when up and moving about, she went about normally.

Stress of any nature may be cause for a dream or nightmare. Love and affection too bring about dreams. The stress encountered while crossing a road may bring about a nightmarish chase by car or even cars.

People usually get nightmares of being chased up a steep by snakes or elephants or other animals and then falling fast down from a precipice. If you have an important appointment or travel the next day, for which you attach a lot of importance, you may dream, most likely a nightmare and while you fall from the precipice, you hear the alarm going or someone calling you or a knock at the door and you wake up to find the alarm clock actually going or your spouse waking you up calling out your name or your friend has come ready to pick you up and knocking at the door.

Shakespeare has immortalized this knocking in his Macbeth.
Though the following was not a dream, it is the reaction of the fevered mind on hearing the knocking at the door.

MACBETH
To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself.
Knocking within
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst! Act 2 scene II
(This knocking continues into Scene III too.)

People who suffer from stress, mild or severe, are sure to get dreams or nightmares. A likely way to get at the root of the problem may be to psychoanalyze these dreams. For ages people have been aware of this relationship between stress and dreams, but only in the modern times dream analysis is given serious consideration. Some research is also going on in the use of hypnotism in cases where the causes are difficult to trace through normal enquiry.

Homeopathy takes into account the mental symptoms along with what the patient says about his illness and its history. They have the strong belief that even the imple and tolerable headache should have some connection with the mind and its reactions to events and environments. The main benefit is that they don’t saturate the system with drugs which may have very serious effects on the system and those effects may remain permanent or last for years. But one thing is sure. The present day medicines make one weak. So my own preference is to homeo remedies. Even if we use the wrong remedy and don't get the desired results immediately, the remedies do not harm us and destroy our basic health.

Freud has written

“…every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance, and one which may be assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state. Further, I shall endeavour to elucidate the processes which underlie the strangeness and obscurity of dreams, and to deduce from these processes the nature of the psychic forces whose conflict or co-operation is responsible for our dreams.”

To complete let me quote Camus:

Life is the sum of all your choices. - Albert Camus

I came across a video of the famous soliloquy ‘To be, or not to be” in YouTube archives. I embed the same for you to view.

Hamlet_ to be or not to be





Video thanks to Youtube
Quotes from quotegarden.com
Read Macbeth Act 2 Scene II
Image: ImageShack