Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 149, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 June 1920 — Last Night’s Dreams [ARTICLE]

Last Night’s Dreams

—What They Mean

DID YOU DREAM OF FALLING? THIS is one of the standard or typical dreams and one over which the scientists have expended a vast amount of “gray matter.” They are generally dreams of peculiar vividness. Lucretius —55 B. C., the celebrated Roman philosopher, In his work on psychology speaks of this dream and Cervantes in “Don Quixote” makes the innkeeper’s daughter say that she has many times experienced this dream and awakened to find herself as weak and shaken as if she had really fallen. Some think that the classic myth of the fall of Icarus Into the Icarlan sea originated in a dream of this kind by some ancient Greek. Havelock Ellis Is Inclined to attribute this dream to purely physical causes. He thinks it may be due to the fact that our respiratory action <breathlng) becomes depressed and at the same time the outer nerves of our skin are reduced to a sta'e of insensibility so that the skin becomes abnormally Insensitive to the contact and pressure of the bed “and the sensation of falling Is necessarily -aroused.” Freud, on the other hand, regards the dream of falling as purely psychological. It Is a dream repeating impressions from childhood. “What uncle,” says he, “has never played falling with a child by rocking It on his knee and then suddenly stretching out his leg, or by lifting It high and then pretending to withdraw the sup■port? Again all children have fallen occasionally and then been picked up and fondled.” The mystics accept the dream as one of direct symbolism. If you dream that you fall from a height and pick yourself up quickly you will attain to honor and riches. But if you igtay where* you fell troubles and losses threaten you. To wake up before you strike bottom, as many dreamers do, ■would appear to save the day for you. though this Is nqt quite so fortunate as to,dream that yon pick yourself up after the fall. (Copyright!