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Saturday, May 2, 2009

Do Dreams Really Mean Anything?

No doubt even the earliest humans were perplexed and fascinated by dreams that can sometimes seem as real as the world around us. Do they really mean anything? Scholars tended to dismiss them as little more than mental fireworks until the latter part of the 19th century. But when Sigmund Freud published "The Interpretation of Dreams" in 1899, he introduced science to the complex and bizarre world hidden in the human mind.

Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious," and for more than a century now, researchers have tried to travel down that road. We know now that dreams do mean something, and they are universal. The most common dream, according to some studies, occurs in all cultures, and it's virtually certain that anyone reading this article has experienced the same dream. Someone, or something, is in hot pursuit, and if the dreamer can't escape, the consequences will be deadly.

That universal dream usually means the person feels threatened, or under attack, or is recalling a time when an attack was real.

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