Hello! This is Aida with a new episode of Learn Arabic with Ease for pre-intermediate learners of colloquial Arabic. In this series, I will be speaking about a different topic every time, suitable for this specific level, and obviously at a slower pace than normal to make it easier for you to understand the content.

 

Today I’m going to talk about dreams. The questions I’ll be tackling are:

What are dreams? Why do we dream? What are the different type of dreams?

 

Dreams are a series of images, feelings and actions that occur during our sleep. Experts believe that we dream between 3-6 times per night and that each dream lasts anywhere between 5-20 minutes. 95% of our dreams are forgotten as soon as we get up in the morning unless a person consciously tries to remember his dreams as soon as he wakes up.

 

Some people dream in colour, while others dream in black and white.

 

Although neurologist, Sigmund Freud, drew attention to the importance of dreams in the 19th century, there is still much disagreement about why we dream.

 

Some of the theories are:

 

We dream because when we sleep, we are trying to process the daily information we collect every day, so dreaming may be a way to strengthen our memory and learning ability and help us deal with everything that has happened around us. Dreams could also be a representation of our unconscious wishes and desires. Another possibility is that dreaming works as a kind of psychotherapy.

 

Dreams include our present experiences, our processing of the past and our subconscious attempt to prepare ourselves for the future.

 

Our knowledge about dreams is still limited and there is still a lot that remains unknown. This is because dreams are difficult to study in a laboratory. Advances in technology and new research methods, however, might improve our understanding of dreams in the future.

 

There are different types of dreams:

 

Lucid dreams are dreams where the person is actively aware that he is dreaming and might be able to control certain aspects of the dream. Around 55% of adults have experienced at least one lucid dream during their lifetime. Some studies have argued that lucid dreams could negatively affect mental health because they can disturb sleep and dreamers could become confused between reality and fantasy.

 

Vivid dreams: Many people don’t remember their dreams or only vaguely remember them once they wake up. However, sometimes, we may wake up with clear memories of our dreams.

The content of a vivid dream can cause feelings of joy or comfort. You may even find yourself waking up wishing you could return to the dream. 

 

Recurring dreams involve the same imagery repeating itself in several dreams over the course of several nights.

 

Psychologists disagree on whether dreams have meaning. Some psychologists argue that dreams helps us to understand a person’s psyche or everyday life, others find that dreams are too inconsistent to reliably have meaning.

 

And now it’s your turn: try in simple sentences to say how often you think you dream, whether you remember your dreams and what you usually dream of.

 

Now let me give you an example of what people might say in reply to questions related to dreams.

 

I remember reading that everyone dreams every night, but mostly I don’t remember my dreams by the time I wake up. I only remember a dream if my sleep is interrupted while I’m still dreaming. People probably have good dreams as long as they’re happy and optimistic but might have an occasional bad dream if they are anxious about something or under too much stress. I don’t think our dreams can be accurately interpreted because even scientists admit that there could be several reasons why we dream. I believe that if we have too many bad dreams, we probably need to find a solution to whatever problem is causing us anxiety in real life. It’s probably true that dreams are a subconscious attempt to try and make sense of our past and current experiences.

 

So, that’s all for today’s episode. I hope you have found it useful. If you liked it, remember that listening to the same episode more than once is very helpful in remembering the new vocabulary you have learnt. It was great having you with me. I’d appreciate you leaving me a like and would love it if you could join me for more episodes.

 

This is Aida from Learn Arabic with Ease! Bye Bye!