Word: dreamer
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Paul Wolfowitz has always been something of a dreamer...
...didn't provide compensating benefits. In the ancestral environment, human life was short and perilous; ever-lurking predators threatened survival and reproductive success. The biological function of dreaming, argues Antti Revonsuo, professor of psychology at the University of Turku, Finland, is to simulate threatening events so to prepare the dreamer for recognizing and avoiding danger...
...over-represented. Based on ongoing work with PhD student Katja Valli, Revonsuo estimates that the average "non-traumatized" young adult has, conservatively, 300 threat-simulation dreams a year. In the dreams of both men and women, male strangers and wild animals are most often the enemy, and the dreamer's typical responses are running and hiding, often in a state of terror...
...Psychotherapists tend to regard a lot of the research into dreaming as missing the point. Scientists, they say, can theorize all they like about dreaming's function and physiological underpinnings, but why dreams matter is their effect on the dreamer. The man contemplating an extramarital affair dreams of the dire consequences of having one. He awakens to feel not only exquisite relief that he was dreaming but determined to walk the line. If, as Solms believes, dreams spring from the motivational part of our brain at a time when other parts that inhibit us are off-line, "it follows that...
...competing theories on why we dream may be wrong. One or more of them could be right. "I have no doubt that dreams can be enjoyable, informative, even revelatory to the dreamer," says Harvard's Stickgold. "But dream analysis is a more tricky question. The more dogmatic and doctrinaire the beliefs of the analyst, the less useful and potentially more destructive the analysis process becomes." People should understand, he adds, that dreams aren't constructed with the goal of delivering a message; they don't have an inherent meaning. "But when you look at your dreams after you wake...