A Dream Come True

It’s a dream come true is today a mere metaphor expressing hope for the future. This sense of the dream is attributed worldwide. The drift away from its literal truth is the result of the superficial interests of science whose main focus is on the visible and tangible. The result is the neglect of the metaphysical aspect of human endeavour. A remnant of the original sense of the dream is in the term ‘weird’, which we attribute to it when we don’t understand its meaning and function. It dates back to Shakespearean times where it appears in Mac Beth’s weird sisters signifying oracular voices. In her sleep laboratory, Rosalind Cartwright has devised one of the most decisive tests of the dream’s function, demonstrating it is without a doubt the precursor of the waking phase. Suppressing the REM functions and substituting them with the solution of mathematical problems has resulted in massive dream rebounds. On the other hand, the substitution of REM dreaming with imaginative developing of the beginning of a REM dream while awake, has shown to be the equivalent of nocturnal dreaming. It is tempting to presume that nocturnal dreams can thus be overridden by daydreaming. Not according to the view held by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Keywords: Daydreaming; Disruption; Dream rebound; Physics; Metaphysics; Nocturnal dreaming; REM; Weird/wyrd