<table border="0" cellpadding="8" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td valign="bottom"><h3><font face="arial"><font color="#aaddff">The Daily Telegraph, Thursday 28th January 1999</font></font></h3>
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<font face="arial" size="-1"></font><h3><font face="arial" size="-1">The Stuff that Dreams are made of...</font></h3>
<h4><font face="arial" size="-1">Jim Horne</font></h4><font face="arial" size="-1"><font face="arial" size="-1">
Even though the sleeper has little knowledge of what is happening during sleep, the slumbering
brain doesn’t just switch off like the bedside light, but is preoccupied with the events and
thoughts of recent wakefulness. For much of sleep ('non-dreaming' sleep) these ruminations,
whether they be happy, sad, or whatever, are fairly rational, slow moving, unimaginative and not
particularly visual. In contrast, and to liven matters up, every ninety minutes during sleep the
curtain rises on the cinema of the mind and dreaming sleep begins, lasting for twenty minutes or
so at a time. This bizarre, technicolour pastiche of unpredictable, fast moving and usually
fascinating scenes is largely based on previous waking events, distorted in irrational ways.
By waking up out of a dream and immediately going over it, the dreamer can usually make some
sense of it all. Dreams are idiosyncratic, and because only we know about the previous day's
events and thoughts, we are the best interpreters of our dreams. As the symbols in dreams mean
different things to each of us, dream "dictionaries" and books on dream analysis purporting to
explain the symbolism, are the fantasies of their authors, being greater works of fiction than
are the dreams themselves.</font></font><p>
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