Dream on, dream on!

I don't usually like talking about dreams, people generally have their own interpretation, and I know all too well that people usually groan when someone is about to tell them about a dream they had. But for the sake of understanding the science of it, which is important in the field I'm considering, I thought I'd break it down a little bit.

First of all, I never bought into Freud, who mostly determined dreams to be stimulation of our primal unconscious. Instead, I was always fond of the Jungian approach, whom saw dreams as a sort of window into the self, they were the ego's way of figuring out itself, that it was an innately spiritual experience.

Jay Dixit however, explains in more concrete details, that dreams are a sort of theater of threat rehearsal, they help us problem solve foreseeable practical problems, whether instinctual or empirical. This particular article is quite interesting, in that it explains a lot of things we already know about dreams, and gives them a perspective that actually makes a lot of sense, while still implicating that there's probably a lot more to the puzzle that we've yet to figure out.

As far as the possibility of using dreams as a therapeutic device, it seems completely rational to me to use dreams as a really effective tool for solving personal problems, traumatic or otherwise. If we could somehow harness the power of suggestion and apply them to dream-like scenarios, then people could solve these problems in their dreams by confronting them head-on. I've never heard of a dream where someone knowingly takes the wrong approach in solving a problem, so I'm leaning towards the thought that if therapy could become effective enough to introduce a potential dream scenario, and suggest possible solutions, then when the actual dream scenario occurs, the patient reinforces in his own mind the solution to that problem, while gaining the benefits and confidence associated with that particular feat.

I'll look more into this as a possible experiment opportunity.

In other news, registration opened up for Seattle Central Community College, I almost signed up for the classes I wanted, only to find out that since I didn't attend Winter quarter, they temporarily locked my registered status. I fixed it by calling them, but apparently I can't officially register until tomorrow. No biggie. Unfortunately, there aren't very many relevant courses for me to take this quarter except for math, so I'm just going to take a couple semi-related classes just for fun, and because I want to become used to taking a full load for the remainder of my school career. And I want to reap the benefits of financial aid. (Which is counter-productive since financial aid on three classes doesn't outweight the full cost of one class, but the other points are still valid.)

That's basically it. Sorry I haven't been posting items too often, I'm going to try to make them shorter and more numerous from here on.