Did you ever have a very lucid dream where you saw spirits and strange landscapes? Perhaps you were so scared you woke up or on the other hand you had an experience where you were together with deceased loved ones? Many claim to have had these types of experiences. Perhaps you weren’t dreaming at all and your mind took you to another plain. There are some who believe our minds are capable of contacting decease family members and even taking us to other places. Could we be mistaken about what we believe are dreams, could there actually be a portal our mind takes us through when we reach a certain mind state? Could the portal be accessed from the other direction? I ask this question because there are those people who say they have seen deceased family members who have come to them, not in dreams but during different times in the day. I am not talking about mentally ill people, but others who would be perceived as quite rational.

It has long been thought our minds possess the potential for greater things, but most of us just don’t know how to control them and make them do these things. They think when we reach a certain state of sleep, such as rem our barriers go down and this allows our minds to more easily perform their magic. So far no results which prove this have been found, or if they have we have not been told about them and apparently if this is a two-way street, the prescribed state of the mind isn’t necessary if we are being contacted from the other side. There are some indications which show the more information we acquire as we get older, the more our minds could be shackled. Take the case for reincarnation, it seems young children are more prone to have information of their reincarnated selves than older children or adults. I am not saying I believe in reincarnation, just that those children who think they were seem to know far too much to be explained and it also seems they begin to forget as they get into older childhood. Could it be their minds are getting too cluttered with information?

There is another theory about this which states we are all reincarnated and not supposed to remember this fact, but some young children, for an unknown reason, do retain this information for a short few years. The reason the information is retained at all could be caused by a genetic mutation or some other such thing. It seems a lot more people think they might have been reincarnated than first thought. Scientists will have none of this of course. They just say these kids have false memories, but can’t explain how they could possibly know some of the things they do about people who they and their parents never knew or heard about.

Sleep produces a lot of strange ideas. One of them is where you think you woke up and are doing things only to eventually really wake up. This puts a strain on us to wonder if we are really awake yet. There are many ancient legends of what can happen to us while we sleep. For some strange reason some of the Mesopotamians recorded their dreams as long ago as 5,000 B.C. What made this even stranger was the fact it must have been very rare to be able to get clay tablets to write on in that period. This shows the importance which was placed on dreams in that period. Some believed dreams were sent from the gods, but this wasn’t true for all at the time. Others thought there were monsters just waiting for us to dream so they could get out. This certainly must have made it very hard for those people to fall asleep. Morpheus was said to be able to enter our sleep. He was the son of Hypnos the Greek god of sleep. His job was to deliver messages from the gods to us while we snoozed away.

Even the word nightmare is based on a spirit which comes to people while they sleep. Mara was depicted in Germanic folklore as an evil spirit which would come to us as we slept. Mara would plop down on the chest of the sleeper constricting their breathing. The purpose for doing this was said to induce nightmares. Some cultures who also believe in Mara hold her responsible for ageing. They claim she slowly sucks the life out of us while we sleep and this process takes many decades.

Native Americans have a legend about the Ojibwe people. They claim they were born on the mythical Turtle Island and the Spider Woman watched over them. She would build a lodge every morning and capture the sun and bring it to them. The lodge was actually a spider web. As the Ojibwe spread the Spider Woman was no longer able to reach each one so she allowed them to build their own lodges which were dreamcatchers. This was created to protect her children from nightmares. They were to hang the dreamcatcher over their sleeping areas at night. The good dreams would filter through the dreamcatcher, but the nightmares would get caught.

As one can see, sleep and what happens to us while we are asleep has fascinated humans probably from the beginning of time. It was thought by many throughout history if you didn’t sleep at night and slept during the day you had to be some sort of creature, like maybe a vampire. Some people are said to have needed much less sleep than the rest of us. There are many reports which state Einstein, Tesla, Da Vinci and others only slept an average of three hours a day. It does make one wonder why these individuals were so different from most of us in their ability to not need as much sleep. To some sleep and death look similar and this is probably why many of us have gotten into the habit of saying we put our pets to sleep when we have to kill them for some reason. It just seems a lot easier to say.

Sleep has puzzled us for many thousands of years and I guess it isn’t done yet.