"Dreams of something more." One coincidence per million
At all times, sleep was rightly perceived by people not only as a necessity, but also as the greatest good. It is no coincidence that various variations of the expression “slept sweetly” are found in many languages of the world.
However, at the same time, sleep as a special state of the body in which a person, even for a while, is completely defenseless and vulnerable in a world full of dangers and enemies, frightened and aroused alarm. Dreams were perceived as the journeys of a soul that went beyond the body, and there were times when people seriously feared that one day she would not be able or would not want to return. Therefore, it was not recommended to abruptly wake sleeping people.
In Hellas, the sleep god Hypnos (Somnomus among the Romans) was the son of the night goddess Nyukta and personifies the eternal darkness of Erebus, the twin brother of the death god Thanatos.
Adolf Senff. Night and Her Children - Death and Sleep, 1822. Alte und Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
Hypnos gave a dream, but it could have killed (especially those who fell asleep at the post - for example, Palinur, the helmed Trojan of Aeneas).
Sleep God Hypnos, British Museum
His other brother was Charon, sisters - Nemesis, Eris and Moira.
Dream interpretation
People have always sought to understand what exactly the gods wanted to tell them, sending this or that dream. For interpretation, people turned to “specialists” (oniomancers). In Babylon, the best onyromancers were considered Chaldeans - priests who observed the movement of stars.
In the Old Testament there is one of the first descriptions of a dream - the famous dream of Jacob, in which he saw a staircase descending from heaven.
William Blake Jacob's ladder
Their "schools" of the interpretation of dreams were in India and China. In Hellas there were temples, the priests of which performed the rituals of "ritual dreams", which they themselves later interpreted.
But there were not so many onyromancers - much less than people who had dreams and wanted to get their explanation. Therefore, already about 2000 years BC. e. in Egypt, the world's first dream book was written (a book for interpreting dreams and predicting the future based on a dream): it contained the interpretation of 200 dreams and a description of magic rituals to protect against evil nightly spirits.
In the II century BC e. Artemidor Daldiansky wrote a five-volume One-Criticism, in which he divided dreams into ordinary and "visionary." The visionary dreams, in his opinion, could be direct-contemplative (they contained direct predictions of the future) and allegorical (spoke of the future in allegorical form). The fifth volume of this study contained examples of the interpretation of various dreams.
And in the "Dream Book of Daniel" written by an anonymous author (around the XNUMXth century), dream plots and interpretation options for the convenience of readers are presented in alphabetical order.
But in Hellas, the first skeptics appeared, which included Aristotle and Diogenes. In ancient Rome, Cicero had a negative attitude to the interpretation of dreams. Later, Newton and Leibniz made attempts to explain dreams by natural causes.
But the voices of skeptics were almost inaudible to the general public, who with great enthusiasm bought up more and more “dream books”, among which was a book written by Michel Nostradamus.
Russian dream book published in 1883
Z. Freud in his work "Interpretation of Dreams" divided dreams into three categories: 1) associated with reality, requiring interpretation; 2) logical and understandable, but not connected with reality; 3) "images and symbols that are not interconnected and not amenable to simple logic."
He attached particular importance to the dreams of the last category, believing that they can explain a person’s behavior and provide an opportunity to assess his mental state.
The Bible explicitly prohibits any attempt to find out the future, but even some famous theologians of the Middle Ages believed that dreams could contain “divine revelation” - for example, Tertullian, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas.
But special attention has always been paid to the dreams of kings and generals. In what spirit were their dreams usually interpreted? This is well described in the Avar tale:
A certain khan, seeing in a dream that he had lost all his teeth, except for the wisdom tooth, ordered the Alim (“knowledgeable”, “knowledgeable”) to be called, who were instructed to explain the meaning of this dream.
The first of them said that all the relatives of the khan would die, for which he received one hundred punches.
The second said that the khan would live longer than anyone else in his family, for which he received a horse and gold.
What did famous people dream about at different times and in different countries? And what interpretation of dreams did they receive? Were these divinations useful to them? Let's see what is written about this in various historical sources.
"I slept a little, but dreamed in a dream"
The very first account of the interpretation of dreams can be found in the Old Testament Book of the Prophet Daniel.
As a teenager, Daniel fell into Babylonian captivity (about 606-607 BC), but nothing bad happened to him there, he was even recognized as “fit to serve in the royal palace,” received a new name Belshazzar and during For three years he studied "books and the Chaldean language." And everything would be fine if it were not for the oddities in the behavior of King Nebuchadnezzar II.
Nebuchadnezzar II, image on the Babylonian cameo
The Bible tells us that once the king woke up in an anxious mood because he had some unpleasant dream. It would seem, with whom does not happen? It was unusual that the king did not remember this dream, but really wished that "secret experts, fortune-tellers, fortune-tellers, sorcerers and Chaldeans" remembered and interpreted this dream for him:
“I had a dream, and my spirit is troubled; I want to know this dream. "
The task was posed with a very large "asterisk" - the level of "go there, I don’t know where, bring that, I don’t know what."
The Chaldeans (who were traditionally considered great experts in the interpretation of dreams) were very surprised and told him:
"King! live forever! tell a dream to your servants, and we will explain its meaning.
The king answered and said to the Chaldeans: the word departed from me; if you don’t tell me the dream and its meaning, then you will be cut into pieces, and your houses will be turned into ruins. ”
The king answered and said to the Chaldeans: the word departed from me; if you don’t tell me the dream and its meaning, then you will be cut into pieces, and your houses will be turned into ruins. ”
Having received no answer, Nebuchadnezzar ordered "to exterminate all the sages of Babylon," among whom already included Belshazzar (Daniel). But for some reason, Daniel did not want to be "exterminated", and therefore he composed a suitable dream for Nebuchadnezzar very quickly and successfully interpreted it.
It turned out that the king dreamed of a huge statue, the head of which was made of gold, the chest and arms were made of silver, the stomach and hips were made of copper, the legs were made of iron, the feet were made of iron mixed with clay. A large stone, rolled down from the mountain, destroyed this statue, striking the lower part, made of iron and clay.
Erhard Altdorfer. The dream of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. Engraving from the Bible, published in Lübeck in 1533.
Daniel identified the golden head with Nebuchadnezzar and his kingdom. Then there was to appear "another kingdom below yours, and another third kingdom, copper, which will rule over all the earth." Daniel called the fourth kingdom strong, like iron: "just as iron breaks and crushes everything, so it, like an all-crushing iron, will crush and crush." The fifth kingdom is “divided, and there will remain several fortresses of iron ... the kingdom will be partly strong, partly brittle ... iron mixed with clay pottery ... mixed through human seed, but will not merge with one another, as iron does not mix with clay” .
It is difficult to say exactly what conclusions and assumptions Nebuchadnezzar made from this interpretation, and whether one can trust the story of the “rich gifts” to Daniel and his appointment to the position of “chief chief over all the wise Babylonians”. But in the moat with the lions of the prophet threw, nevertheless, not he, but the Persian king Darius.
Later interpreters of the Holy Scripture confidently recognized the kingdom of the Medes and Persians in the silver part of the statue, the copper belly and hips, in their opinion, personified Greece, the iron legs - Rome. Well, clay mixed with iron is Europe, formed after the fall of the Roman Empire, some of whose states are rich and strong, others are poor and weak.
The prophecy of Daniel, according to tradition, ends with the prediction of the end of the world, the symbol of which is a stone rolling down a mountain. And the new, eternal kingdom will not be erected by people, but by God.
This dream, of course, was worthy of the great king, and its interpretation is beyond praise, but skeptics have some doubts about whether the dream belongs to Nebuchadnezzar. However, here we are talking about Faith, which, according to theologians, should be stronger than reason.
“I believe, for it is absurd,” Tertullian once said.
Soon Nebuchadnezzar also saw a second dream, which, unlike the first, he was able to remember: a saint who descended from heaven ordered to cut down a tree as high as the sky and with many fruits, leaving only the main root in the earth. In addition, he took a human heart from this tree, giving in return an animal - "for seven times." This dream was also interpreted by Daniel, who said that for pride Nebuchadnezzar would be punished by the loss of power and excommunicated for seven years.
Nebuchadnezzar allegedly later lost his mind and, imitating animals, ate grass for seven years, but then his mind returned to him.
Talking about this, it must be borne in mind that modern scholars are confident that the Book of Daniel was created in Palestine in the middle of the II century BC. e. - almost 500 years after the events described in it.
Now we will pass from sacred texts to historical sources.
Ancient authors claim that the trip of the Persian king Xerxes to the Peloponesse (480 BC) was provoked by constant dreams in which a certain Spirit demanded to start a war, warning that, otherwise, Xerxes would lose power, and then completely, began to threaten to gouge out his eyes. In this war, the Greeks won victories in the battles of Salamis, at Plataeus and at Cape Mikale, the Persians lost Byzantium, Rhodes, part of Cyprus, Chersonesus of Thrace. Another consequence of this war was the creation of an aggressive Delos alliance led by Athens.
King Xerxes, bas-relief. National Archaeological Museum, Tehran
Unlucky with the “prophetic dream” was another Persian king - Darius III. He dreamed that the phalanx of Alexander was engulfed in flames, and the Macedonian king himself at first served him in the clothes that Darius had previously worn as an acting messenger, and then entered the temple of Bel and disappeared into it. Mages, of course, predicted the victory of Persia, but everything turned out the other way around. Then I had to rethink the prophecy in the spirit that the Macedonian warriors would perform brilliant feats, Alexander would take possession of Asia in the same way as Darius, a former messenger, but who had become king.
Alexander the Great attacks the Persian king Darius III, mosaic from the city of Pompeii, National Museum, Naples
Alexander the Great also saw a “prophetic” dream during the siege of the city of Tire: he dreamed of a satyr whom he caught in the forest. It would seem, what does this “night adventure” in the fantasy style have to do with current affairs? But the regular royal soothsayer Aristander from Telmesos divided the Greek word “satyros” into two: “sa” and “tyros” - it turned out “Your Tyr”. Of course, there is not the slightest doubt that Alexander would have taken Tire without any dreams, but anyway, it turned out well.
And here is how he once deceived the dream of the Carthaginian commander Hamilcar (most likely this is another Hamilcar - not Barca) during the fighting in Sicily: a voice in a dream predicted that he would have dinner in the city that besieges. Hamilkar immediately threw his troops into the assault, but was defeated and captured. So he had a chance to have dinner in this city, but not as a winner, but as a prisoner.
Julius Caesar once had a dream that it wouldn’t even occur to a normal person to talk about: as if he had "shared a bed with his mother." Nevertheless, he told about this dream and received a promising “decoding”: Caesar’s mother, allegedly, symbolized the “mother city” of Rome, which this ambitious person will have to master.
And here is a story about a ghost that appeared to one of Caesar's killers - Mark Junius Brutus. Roman authors write: "waking up, I saw" (his Brutus). But with a high degree of probability it can be argued that everything was the opposite: "woke up when he saw."
The ghost called himself an evil genius and said that for the second time Brutus would see him at Philippi. However, October 3, 42 BC e. Brutus' troops won a decisive victory over the army of Octavian, capturing the enemy camp and almost capturing the enemy commander, the Caesarian losses were twice as large as the republican. Moreover, Brutus sent part of his cavalry to help the army of Cassius, which was crowded by the troops of Mark Anthony. But Cassius, a man in military affairs much more experienced than Brutus, mistook this unit for the enemy. Seeing him, he panicked and committed suicide. So the ghost, probably, should have come not to Brutus, but to Cassius. In the next battle, Brutus' flank was again close to overturning the enemy, but on the other flank again the soldiers who had previously been commanded by Cassius fled. The Caesarians did not pursue Brutus' retreating army, and the war had not yet been lost, but a trusted man sent to assess the condition of the troops accidentally died on the way. Without waiting for him, Brutus threw himself on his sword, confident in complete defeat and catastrophic defeat.
The death of Brutus. Illustration for Shakespeare's play "Julius Caesar", 1802, British Museum
Probably, the phenomenon of the "ghost" still had an impact on the state of the psyche of Brutus. He then calmly answered him: “I will see,” but, of course, the “sediment” in the soul remained.
Druz Claudius Nero, brother of the future emperor Tiberius and father of the future emperor Claudius, commanding the Roman troops, refused to cross the Elbe, seeing in a dream a woman who told him:
“Friends! Where are you going? Aren't you tired of winning? Know that you are on the edge of your existence! ”
Druz Claudius Nero Elder, bust, Vatican Museums
Septimius Severus saw in a dream Emperor Pertinax falling from a horse, on which he then sat himself. This dream was interpreted to him as a sign that he would replace Pertinax, becoming the next emperor. Septimius did not forget about this prediction, and when Pertinax was killed in Rome, he opposed Didius Julian, proclaimed emperor by the Praetorians, and then against other pretenders: the Passion of the Niger and Claudius Septimius Albinus.
Septimius Severus, bust. Rome, Capitoline Museums, New Palace, Hall of Emperors
If you believe the Life of St. Dominic, his mother saw in a dream that her baby was lit a lamp that lit up the whole world, and then also a dog with a torch. She took her dreams more than seriously, and thanks to the upbringing she gave her son, Dominic grew up a religious fanatic. He condemned the death of thousands of Cathars during the Albiguian Wars and organized a monastic order, whose members took an active part in the work of the Inquisition Tribunals.
His contemporary and antipode, St. Francis, hearing a voice in a dream calling him to restore the "house of God", left home and founded the order of mendicant monks, and at the same time contributed to the emergence of the female monastic order of the Poor Claris.
The ousted Japanese emperor Go-Daigo (reigned 1318-1339) saw in a dream a tree around which ministers and aristocrats sat, and only on the south side was an empty seat, which two children called the throne. Waking up, he folded the hieroglyphs “south” and “tree”, and received a new symbol - “camphor tree”, sounding like “bites”. The emperor asked: does anyone know a person with that or a similar name? The right person was found - it turned out to be Kusunoki Masashige. His Go-Daigo and appointed commander of his troops. Masashige honestly fought for the emperor, but could not win. In 1336, he was defeated by the army of the future Shogun Asikagi Takaudzi and committed suicide. Komyo was soon proclaimed the new emperor, so Go-Daigo had to move from Kyoto to Yoshino. However, Kusunoki Masashige went down in the history of the country as an example of a faithful vassal.
Kusunoki Masashige Monument in Tokyo
Thirteen-year-old Joan of Arc, a girl from the village of House Remy, saw in a dream the archangel Michael, accompanied by Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, who called on her to save France. And she remembered Merlin's prophecy, which said that one day the virgin-savior would come from a village in Lorraine, near which an oak forest grows. Everything coincided: the order of the archangel, pagan prophecy, she was a virgin, and the oaks around her native village grew in sufficient quantity. There was no way out, Jeanne went to save France - and saved her.
Allen Douglas, "Saint Joan of Arc in the War on the British"
But then the highest hierarchs of the French Catholic Church and the most authoritative professors of the Sorbonne explained to the girl that the voices calling for her to defend her homeland belonged to the demons Velial, Behemoth and Satan. On May 30, 1431, Jeanne was excommunicated and sentenced to be burned at the stake. Before the execution, she asked for forgiveness from the British and the Burgundians, whom she ordered to pursue and kill. Only two people tried to help her somehow: Gilles de Rais, who, at the head of a detachment of soldiers hired for his own money, wanted to break through to Rouen, but was late, and the nameless English warrior rushed into the fire to give Jeanne a wooden crucifix.
Execution of Joan of Arc, medieval miniature
“The Lion of the North”, the Swedish king Gustav Adolf, on the eve of the Battle of Lutzen, saw in a dream a huge tree that grew before his eyes from the ground, covered with leaves and flowers, then withered and fell at his feet. The dream was clearly auspicious and foreshadowed the victory (which the Swedes won the next day), perhaps this deprived the king of due caution - he was killed during this battle.
Carl Wahlbom. The death of Gustavus Adolphus at the Battle of Lutzen
Oliver Cromwell on the eve of the execution of Charles I had a dream, as if an executioner was putting a crown on his head made of bones of the dead. No wonder: what the man was thinking about (about the power that awaits him after the execution of the king), he dreamed.
Paul Delaroche. Oliver Cromwell at the tomb of Charles I
But Charles X (brother of two Louis XVI and XVIII, the king of France from 1824 to 1830) had completely different thoughts, and therefore on the night of June 25-26, 1830 he saw in a dream a boar who wounded him during hunting. A little later, the boar was identified with the rebellious subjects, who forced him to abdicate on August 2 of that year.
In the diary of Abraham Lincoln, there is a curious entry about a dream that he saw 10 days before his murder: in one of the rooms of the White House, soldiers stood guard on a closed coffin. To the question: “Who died?”, They answered him: “President.”
What can I say? Someday the law of large numbers had to work, and at least one such coincidence in a million other unfulfilled dreams had to happen.
The famous dream of the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu (Zhuang Zhou), in which he saw himself as a butterfly, as a result of which he thought that, “if Chuang Tzu can become a butterfly in a dream, then perhaps the butterfly fell asleep and dreams that she is Chuang Tzu. " Thus, a new doctrine, imbued with skepticism, was created, stating that life is limited, and knowledge is unlimited.
Night flights of the Witches
Talking about dreams, one cannot but mention the famous flights of witches, which they also performed in a dream, but not ordinary, but narcotic. The materials of the Vedic processes indicate that, going to bed, these women rubbed an ointment in the chest, temples, under the armpits and in the groin area, which included aconite, belladonna, speckled hemlock. Opium poppy, hemp, wormwood, juniper, white water lily, yellow capsule could be added to them in various combinations and combinations.
Beladonna. Delirious and hallucinating substances are found in all parts of this plant.
Aconite. Extremely poisonous plant, which sometimes is planted in suburban areas as a decorative
Hemlock hemlock, in folk medicine tincture of its leaves and seeds is used as an anesthetic
Different recipes also indicate such additional ingredients as incense, flies, wine, vegetable oil, salt, bat blood, deceased fat (or fox, wolf or badger), cat's brain, rust, soot.
There was no single recipe for “witch ointment”, only the basis was common.
In V. Bryusov’s novel “The Fiery Angel”, the heroine speaks during an interrogation by the inquisitors:
“We took different herbs: a saucer, parsley, calamus, branchberry, nightshade, bleached, infused from a fighter, added oils from plants and bat blood and cooked it, pronouncing special words that were different for different months.”
This, by the way, is one of the authentic recipes for the “flying ointment” of the German “witches”.
Next:
“In the evening, at night, when the Sabbath was gathering, we rubbed our bodies with a special ointment, and then we either had a black goat that carried us through the air on its back, or the demon himself, in the form of a gentleman dressed in a green camisole and a yellow vest, and I held on to his neck while he flew over the fields. If there was no goat, no demon, you could sit on any object, and they flew like the most greyhound horses. "
Here the author also does not deviate from the truth: a typical testimony of a medieval “witch” is given, in the archives of the Inquisition Tribunals you can find many similar ones.
Mass psychosis in a nunnery caused by the appearance of the heroine of the novel “Fiery Angel”: “Unhappy girls, one after another, suddenly fell with a groan and fought terribly against stone slabs of the floor ... calling the archbishop himself a servant of the devil, or ... magnifying his sister Mary as the bride of a heavenly angel” .
The hallucinations caused by the use of "witch ointment" were unusually realistic. Here is how Knight Ruprecht, the protagonist of this novel, describes its action:
“Until now, having already moved a far distance from that day, I can’t say with complete certainty whether everything I experienced was a terrible truth or an equally terrible nightmare, the creation of imagination, and whether I sinned before Christ with word and deed, or only thinking ...
The ointment burned the body slightly, and its smell quickly started to make my head spin, so soon I was not well aware of what I was doing, my hands hung helplessly, and my eyelids dropped into my eyes. Then the heart began to beat with such force, as if it were bouncing off my chest on the rope an entire elbow, and it hurt ... when I tried to rise, I could no longer think: all the tales about the Sabbath were nonsense and this miraculous ointment is only an euthanasia "a potion, - but at the same time everything faded for me, and I suddenly saw myself or imagined myself high above the ground, in the air, completely naked, sitting astride, like a horse, on a black shaggy goat."
The ointment burned the body slightly, and its smell quickly started to make my head spin, so soon I was not well aware of what I was doing, my hands hung helplessly, and my eyelids dropped into my eyes. Then the heart began to beat with such force, as if it were bouncing off my chest on the rope an entire elbow, and it hurt ... when I tried to rise, I could no longer think: all the tales about the Sabbath were nonsense and this miraculous ointment is only an euthanasia "a potion, - but at the same time everything faded for me, and I suddenly saw myself or imagined myself high above the ground, in the air, completely naked, sitting astride, like a horse, on a black shaggy goat."
This description is not a figment of the author’s imagination, it is taken from the original protocols of the inquisition courts.
Night flight of the witches on the Sabbath, engraving
In the book “The Long Journey: A History of Psychedelia” (2008), a modern British researcher Paul Devereaux claims to have tried to test the effect of “witch ointment” made according to one of the medieval recipes. He describes his feelings as follows:
“I had wild dreams. Those who danced before my eyes were terrible at first. Then I suddenly felt like flying through the air for miles. The flight was repeatedly interrupted by rapid falls. ”
Visions of medieval “witches” were determined by the mood and expectations of women who applied this ointment. Now they would probably see themselves not flying on a black goat or on a broomstick on the Sabbath with the devil, but in the "flying saucer" of aliens. Or, they imagined themselves to be an elven archer from Warcraft III, who attacks an orc wyvern on a hippogryph.
By the way, the fact that the defendants flew to the Sabbath only in a dream was, as a rule, not a mitigating factor for the inquisitors.
You have probably heard of the so-called "sleeping prophet" Edgar Cayce. You could write about him in this article, but I moved this story to the next, in which we will talk about the “Messiahs of recent days,” be patient a little.
In conclusion, it must be said that sleep is an extremely complex physiological state, which also has two completely different phases - “slow” (deep) sleep and “fast”. Lack of sleep is no less fatal than starvation and thirst. A dream is not just a vacation: it has a huge number of other functions, the study of which is devoted to hundreds of scientific works, and it is unlikely to be able to talk about it in a nutshell. But modern somnologists (specialists who study sleep and its disturbances) assure that in a dream the brain does not establish “astral connections” with anyone and with nothing and does not receive new information, but tries to deal with the one that was received during the day. The brain seems to be "rebooting", trying to remove excess and unnecessary, as well as negatively colored information, and systematizing useful information. This happens during the REM sleep phase. It is in this phase, when the information received during the day is being processed that the person sees some more or less plot-related images, which he then recalls only as an exception - ideally, the person should not remember dreams. And if he still woke up, remembering the dream he had, our brain, as if embarrassed by its “rough” work, as a rule, very quickly deletes these memories - after half an hour of vigorous activity, we forget about the details of this dream, and then about it itself.
If a person has been thinking hard about something for a long time, during sleep his brain can continue to work in this direction, but already “without brakes”. This interferes with a good rest, but sometimes it helps to find the right solution - therefore they say that “morning is wiser than evening” and “I will think tomorrow with a fresh mind”. But much more often the result of such overstrain is not “insights”, but nightmare obsessive dreams. And the brain is resting, unlike the rest of the body, only in the phase of “slow sleep” (but it was at this time that the pituitary gland began to produce the extremely important hormone somatotropin). The lack of "slow sleep" is often perceived as insomnia. This condition is well described in a poem by R. Rozhdestvensky:
“I dreamed that it smelled of burning.
Dreaming, blizzard chalk,
She dreamed that she was different.
waiting for you at the subway ...
Another sat next to her.
Her cheeks were pale ...
If all this is not true,
Why then dream?
Why do I need - say mercy -
to know the smell of her hair?
But I didn’t dream of anything.
I just could not sleep. "
Dreaming, blizzard chalk,
She dreamed that she was different.
waiting for you at the subway ...
Another sat next to her.
Her cheeks were pale ...
If all this is not true,
Why then dream?
Why do I need - say mercy -
to know the smell of her hair?
But I didn’t dream of anything.
I just could not sleep. "
Of course, all this woman was painfully jealous of her husband in a dream. The lack of a phase of slow sleep led to the fact that these visions did not disappear from her memory and the perception of sleep itself was disturbed - a sensation of painful insomnia arose.
And nightly changes in the hormonal balance in combination with an increase in the tone of the parasympathetic system in young and healthy people sometimes cause erotic dreams.
K. Bryullov. "The dream of a young girl before dawn"
In the Middle Ages, for such a dream in which a young woman allegedly entered into relations with an incubus, they could have burned her like a witch.
The Fiery Serpent (Lyubavets, Volokita, Lyubostay) is an old Russian incubus that visited girls, wives and widows at night, and is visible only by the “victims” of its “lust”. This is how the "demon" of female masturbation was presented to our ancestors
Now about some of the causes and mechanisms of nightmares. Sleep is so important for the human body that there are protective mechanisms, the purpose of which is to allow a person to rest and sleep, without waking up due to some uncritical situations - uncomfortable position of the arm or leg, unexpressed and non-dangerous pain in the back, stomach or in the heart . But, since the impulses about pain and discomfort, nevertheless, reach the brain, he reacts to this not with awakening, but with a certain dream - unpleasant and even nightmare. For example, that a person cannot get out of a snowdrift or from an ice hole - if his leg is frozen, with which the blanket slipped. Or - that someone is chasing after him, if there are heart problems and there is an episode of shortness of breath. A pronounced heartburn in the brain during sleep can be associated with a fire.
In this picture of Johann Heinrich Fussley, a woman sees a nightmare because she sleeps in a very uncomfortable position
In any case, in a dream it is impossible to get new information, to see a stranger or to "get" to a completely unfamiliar place (in which a person has never been and never heard of). Therefore, to build some kind of guesses about the future, relying on their dreams, is at least naive and unreasonable.
In the final article of the cycle, we will talk about the "visionaries" and "prophets" who have recently revealed themselves to the world, and try to answer the question: can their talents be used to benefit society and the motherland?
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