Those of you about my age (ancient) will remember this line from an Everly Brothers song: “Whenever I want you all I have to do is dream, dream, dream.”

I’m sure you, like everyone, has had a wonderful dream now and then in which you found yourself with something you’ve really wanted but could never have in real life. Certainly I have.

I remember as a kid I dreamed I had a pony, dreamed I could fly like Superman, dreamed I was flying a plane. As a teenager I dreamed I was a soldier at war, that I had the coolest car in town, that that cute little chick at school was in love with me (she wasn’t). As an adult my dreams were more complex, often about being with my family, even with my deceased parents and grandparents. Sometimes in celebration with the friends of my youth.

But dreams aren’t always so pleasant. Sometimes they‘re downright depressing or terrifying. That’s very true in my experience and, I suspect, for most of us.

When I was three, maybe four years old I several times dreamed I found myself alone inside a tiny room. It had no window or door, but on one side it had the end of a tunnel, an opening about four or five feet square.  I knew that someone or something very horrifying was going to come out of that tunnel. I have  never in my life felt the absolute terror that I did then. Every night at bedtime I begged God and my parents to never make me sleep again.

On other nights--and this one continued in later childhood years--I was many hundreds of feet high in the sky. And I was falling. As I fell I grew more and more terrified and a pain in my abdomen grew more intense. But just before I reached the ground an unforeseen force swung me upwards, the pain receded and the whole thing went on again, over and over, up and down.

Often my dreams as an adult have me seeking a goal that keeps eluding me. I’m  a student at University and I’m trying to find the building where I’m to write a very important exam. I come to building after building, but never the right one. Or I’ve just got a job as teacher in a school I’ve never seen before. It’s ten minutes to nine, then five minutes, and I’m still at home trying vainly to get ready to leave, but obstacle after obstacle is always in my way.

Some famous people have had some famous dreams. Mary Shelley in 1816 had a dream that inspired her to write the novel FRANKENSTEIN that is often credited with being the first science fiction book.

Paul McCartney says he awoke from a dream with the entire melody of “Yesterday”.

Albert Einstein credited a dream he had that started the process that led to his theory of relativity.

Abraham Lincoln, some two weeks before he was killed, told a friend of dreaming he was at his own funeral where people spoke of him being assassinated.

And where do our dreams actually come from? Scientists say they come from part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, which “is charged with building, imagining and recreating memories”. So our own experiences, it seems, are the basis of our dreams and the brain, for good or ill manipulates them.

Most of the world’s religions have traditionally seen dreams as coming from the spirit world, “a kind of doorway between the earthly and the spiritual realms”. 

Many Christians believe dreams come as communications from God. 

And I’m sure those of you who have dogs and watched their legs move in their sleep believe animals have dreams too.  It’s part, it seems, of being alive, and having a brain.

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