A human being sleeps away 1/3 of his life. If you truly think about it, this is a very significant amount of time. But why is it so important to get rest? Is there something significant about it? Is there a purpose for dreams? What do they mean? Are they trying to tell us something? What is sleep really? Not until just recently have dreams been really looked at and examined. Before, people thought they were just a bunch of "hocus-pocus" like a horoscope. Now, scientists are researching and learning more and more on the wonderful idea of a dream. There is so much information on a topic that is not fully grounded because people have made up theories to explain why things do what they do. This means to say that not all the information provided may be completely accurate but a person has free will to pick and choose what he believes to be true. When a person goes to bed, they are thinking about waking up in the morning. They are missing all the action that takes place under the conscious level. The world of sleep will open your eyes to new ideas and a person will become aware of what a dream is all about.
To understand the world of sleep, you need to know what happens when you close your eyes at night. As you begin to fall asleep, your body starts to slow down. Your heart rate declines, your temperature drops, and you breathing becomes slow and even. You are entering stage one of sleep, which lasts about 10 minutes. During this lightest sleep stage, your eyes roll around, and short visual pictures flash across your mind. Sometimes people report that they have sudden twitches. These twitches are theorized as a result of the brain stimulating a muscle that has been very tense that day. Form personal experience, these twitches usually precede after a short dream of falling off something. Other psychologists would argue that the act of falling means something significant. Ann Faraday, a Ph.D. with a few published books on dreams, states that she has had a dream of falling of a ladder and then the next day she checked out the ladder and there was a loose screw.
