OUTRO

Hello friends!
So today was the last day of the semester for me, and as I approach exams like tank this upcoming school week, I thought it would be nice to quickly sum up and pause to reflect what Bible class 2013/2014 has done for me.
All in all, it's been great. I always love to discuss the interesting points we have in class, and while some would argue that in Bible class, you should study the Bible, this past semester has taught me that no matter what, EVERYTHING can be related to God and the Bible, using something called, The Biblical Throughlines:

We were asked to somehow relate the Biblical Throughlines to our passion projects we've been working on all semester, and that got me thinking about things outside this project on this blog, which I think was the purpose of learning them!

Here are the throughlines I thought fit well with the topic of dreams:

-God-worshippers

-Idolatry-discerners

-Creation-enjoyers

-Order-discoverers (this one is unfortunately not featured on the picture, but it is a throughline!)



 

Generally though, with this project I would just like to say how thankful I am to have had the opportunity to learn about dreams! Having so much freedom in this project helped me discover the importance of how you have to be on top of yourselves, which is a key necessity for the real world. We can learn so much from these projects, other than just the obvious. While I truly believe that this is forever my last post on Somnium Ignotis, I would love nothing more than to continue to search my own dreamworld and what God has to offer me in my life beyond school (I'm graduating in June), and how everything relates and intertwines. This experience has been great, and I can't wait to do more. Huge shout out to my mentor, Betty Brandt for helping me out when I was on the dim side with knowledge about this topic. Thanks for reading, keep it real.

WHY DOESN'T EVERYONE REMEMBER THEIR DREAMS?

First of all, I'm going to put the rumour to rest that not everyone dreams.
Every single person dreams while they are asleep, just not everyone remembers what those dreams are. Some people have very vivid dreams, and can recall everything the next day. Other people can remember what a dream was in the morning, however throughout the day, the dreams fades and by the evening they cannot remember a single detail. And yet, there are even so some people who wake up, completely unaware of what they dreamt during their sleep. It's curious, really. According to livescience.com, scientists aren't even one hundred percent sure as to why not everyone can. New research suggests however, that people who respond more strongly than others when hearing their name.
Also, I imagine it may not be too much of a stretch to believe this, but it appears that more creative people tend to dream (or remember their dreams, rather) more rapidly, vividly and avidly. Dreams full of colour and backstory's and all that jazz. The reason why? Rowena-cory-daniells.com states that, "People who are prone to daydreaming and fantasy have less of a barrier between states of sleep and wakefulness and seem to more easily pass through them."
In addition to THAT, it also seems that video game players are able to control their dreams to a point, due to their high levels of concentration. These video game players are also more common in being able to lucid dream (dream, but knowing that you are in control).
Now I would like remind everyone that these facts are just generally speaking. Just because you don't remember  a super vivid dream, that's not to say that you are not creative. And just because you don't play video games excessively, doesn't mean that you cannot control your dreams to a point, or even lucid dream (I lucid dream quite often, and I can't even remember the last time I touched a video game remote!). And if we're talking about dreams that God sends as messages, I would say that that is not based on your creativity or video game standards either. THAT is about the person, not just dreams that you have because your thoughts have been racing on a specific subject or something along those lines...

Dream, Interrupted

Although it has been an excruciatingly long time, as promised I finally have my dream from....November? December? I can't even remember, it's been too long!
I'm going to start by summarizing it as brief and best as I can, and then I will give my mentor's take on what it means:
"My family and three friends went to this "haunted" cabin (that I've dreamed of before) to stay for a vacation. While we were there, my three friends were staying in a small room together, and it blew up. I didn't see them again in the dream, so I think they died. Throughout the dream, I discovered that it was not in fact (or as far as I knew) haunted, but that Loki (villain in the Thor movie series and Norse god of mischief), kept come and causing mischief for fun, and using a magic trick he has in the movies to turn into other people and just stir up trouble. Sending replicas of himself to cause trouble, he would disappear before anyone could catch him, except he was fond of me, so he would let just me get a glimpse of him, then would disappear so that I knew it was him behind it all. My family however, was freaked out since they thought it was legitimately haunted, so we left the cabin early, and right when I woke up, Loki was trying to keep us from leaving because he didn't want me to go."

Here's what my mentor had to say:
"Regarding your dream, it sounds to me like the dream itself is not significant but because you have had the same dream several times, I would say it is your emotions in the dream that are important. God often wants to show us things about areas he wants to heal in our emotions. For example if you constantly have emotions of fear or shame in a dream, then it is God saying that you have fear or shame in your life that you need to be freed from."