 Well, we have finally arrived at the central issue of Jungian Dream Interpretation. I know from the emails I have received from listeners that many of your questions revolve around how to interpret their dreams or what a particular dream means. This area is quite complicated, but with the ideas you have from the first six episodes you should be able to make some headway through this fascinating area of dreams. I like to say to my analytical patients that you need to interpret at least 30 or so of your own dreams before you feel confident in the process. Like everything else in life, there is a learning curve, so just stick with it. If you run into difficulties, just email me and I may be able to point you in the right direction. At this stage, focus on your own dream interpretation and leave the dreams of friends aside until you feel competent in this process. There are a few things I need you to bear in mind as we work through this area together. The first is that the dreamer owns the dream. This means that whatever the interpretation is, unless the dreamer feels that the interpretation is accurate, the interpretation is wrong. The second issue is that dreams are vibrant, vital aspects of the psyche, so need to be treated with great care and respect. Never ever overinterpret a dream. Always work through the dream to the point that there is still some life and juice left in it. Trashing a dream to death is a common mistake we all make when we start. I like having dreams that occasionally I cannot understand. They usually make sense later on in the week or month. The third issue that we need to be aware of is not to take the message that the dream offers as literal. I can recall that so often people will face a big decision in their lives and say that they will wait until a dream comes up and tells them what to do. Dreams don't tell you what to do. They give you a comment on the conscious attitude you hold. At the end of the day it is the relationship between your dream material and the ego that really counts. So these three points again are 1. The interpretation has to fit the dreamer. 2. Don't thrash the dream and 3. The dream offers a comment not a prescription. Our work on dream interpretation will cover at least three podcasts. More likely more as we have a great deal of material to cover. In today's episode we need to deal with the issue of sleep and why we should interpret dreams at all. We spend about a third of our life asleep. Yet it is an area of our existence we know very little about. It is during sleep that we dream. So let's focus on certain of the core essentials to this wonderful encounter with Morpheus, who is the god of dreams in Greek mythology and the son of the god of sleep, Hypnos. Not of course to be confused with Morpheus in the movie Matrix. Although if you think about that role that Morpheus had in the movie his name is highly appropriate. Just as an aside if anyone is interested in the movie Matrix let me know via email as I would be very interested in discussing this issue from a Jungian perspective. So back to the topic of sleep. There are two physiological states of sleep that we all go through each night. These are non-rem or non-rapid eye movement and rem or rapid eye movement. So the term rem is an acronym for the phrase rapid eye movement because when we are in rem our eyes move rapidly while we are asleep. If ever you have watched someone having an intense dream you can often notice that their eyes are flickering back and forth under their eyelids. So non-rem or n-r-e-m is a physiological state of sleep in which there is no rem or no rapid eye movement. Non-rem is the start of our sleep cycle and the phase of non-rem usually lasts for the first 90 minutes of sleep. What is very important to know about the state of sleep is that our overall physiological functions are reduced. This means that our heart rate, our respiration and blood pressure are reduced. This is also the time when we can have small episodic muscle movements such as small twitches in the body. Deeper stage non-rem that is stages 3 and 4 have a so reduced in responses that if we are awoken during these stages we often appear quite disoriented and may take quite a while to come to full consciousness. If we are awakened by night terrors, a specific kind of dream activity and sleep disturbance we take quite a while to come back to focus. We may not be quite sure if we are awake or not and often the scary parts of the dream still seem to be very real. You have all experienced a night terror at some stage and it is quite different to a nightmare. When we awake from a nightmare we know we are in our beds and it was just a bad dream but in a night terror that takes quite a while to clear. We need non-rem to allow the body to do its repair functions. Rem phase sleep on the other hand is quite different to non-rem. In REM another set of physiological behaviours occur that mark it as quite different from non-rem. Our heart rate, respiration rate and blood pressure are all elevated, in fact in some people these functions are higher than if they were awake. Another peculiar behaviour occurs in REM that is our thermoregulation is altered. Thermoregulation refers to the body's automatic capacity to raise or lower its core temperature based on the environmental temperature. We all know that if we go outside in winter without enough warm clothing that we start to shiver. If it is the height of summer we often start to sweat. In REM something different occurs and that is we start to use a thermoregulation function called poikilothermic regulation, P-O-I-K-I-L-O-T-H-E-R-M-I-C regulation which means that our body temperature varies with the environmental temperature. As the bedroom gets cooler so does the body and vice versa. So we stop shivering or sweating. Do you remember those nights where you suddenly woke up from an intense dream and you were freezing cold and started shivering or you were so hot that you started sweating? Well part of that is because you were in REM and the body was engaged in poikilothermic temperature regulation. A very important behaviour occurs in REM and that is our skeletal muscles are paralyzed. This means that the muscles we use to walk or to lift things like the muscles in the legs or the arms no longer function. Why is that do you think? The simple answer is that during REM sleep we are often moving in our dreams say running from a pack of wolves or trying to catch someone. If our skeletal muscles were still active we would thrash about in bed and injure ourselves or our partners. We also know that when we are very young we spend about half of our sleeping life in REM in other words active dreaming. As we get older this amount of REM diminishes so by the time we get to adulthood we spend about 25 percent of our sleep in REM. This proportion also diminishes as we get into our senior years. Now there is a definite cycle between non-REM and REM during our sleep. We start with non-REM. In stage one of non-REM we are in a transitional state and are easily awoken. In stage two we feel a greater sense of relaxation and are in light sleep. In stages three and four we're in deep sleep and this is the time that the body engages in restorative functions. Now we can also dream in non-REM but these dreams are far less powerful than their REM cousins. The first REM phase follows non-REM stage four. So we have to go through non-REM to finally get to the good stuff in REM. The cycle of sleep goes from non-REM one to two to three to four and sometimes back up to non-REM three then two then into REM. The critical issue is that if you are in REM and are awoken you have to get back to REM by going through non-REM phases first which means that if we are awoken in a dream or we are awoken because of a nightmare when we go back to sleep we don't actually go straight back into the dream we have to go through some non-REM phases first. We also know that if you prevent someone from having adequate REM sleep two very important consequences result. The first is that the person progressively becomes more and more agitated and less capable so their cognitive capacities are reduced. They will have impairment in their fine motor skills first so that they find it hard to do something like put a key into a lock or to write something down then their gross motor skills are impaired so that they act as though they are very clumsy or even look drunk. But the second issue is far more dangerous and that is if you deprive someone of REM phase sleep long enough often two or three days they begin to have disturbances in their reality testing and executive functioning. In severe situations you will note that a REM deprived person may actually have brief breakdowns in their reality testing so that they may begin to even hallucinate. This is why a classic form of punishment or torture that all nations have practiced since early times is simply to keep the prisoner awake. In other words to severely REM deprive the prisoner. Those of you that have worked very long shifts will know that REM deprivation feels really really unpleasant. You feel as though you're walking in molasses you can't make sense of basic issues you forget things but most of all you feel like you're prepared to sleep at any cost.