Dreams And Dreams

Dreams: A brief history and demonstration through opera.
The word dream stems from the West Germanic word draugmus meaning deception, illusion, or phaeton. Everyone dreams about four to seven dreams a nights. Everyone also forgets nearly ninety percent of their dreams. Twelve percent of people only dream in black and white and the rest dream in full color. Interesting enough, blind people dream as well. Those that lost sight after birth can remember images. Those born blind dream just as intensely utilizing the other senses of touch, sound, smell, and emotion. Overall, the most common emotion in dreams is anxiety.
Dreams are a phenomena discussed in the earliest of Western myths, medieval and Renaissance fairy tales. The earliest writings

Examples are found in the Chinese Culture: In Chinese culture people called on their ancestors for dream revelations by sleeping on graves. Like the Egyptians, the Chinese have a dream book. Duke of Zhou Interpret Dreams was a book dreams that recounts the dreams of Duke of Zhou (God of Dreams)
Literary figures used dreams and even sleep, a precursor to dreaming, as devices to progress plots and characters. William Shakespeare used this tool in many of his writings. For example, dreams are found in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard the III, Romeo and Juliet, and King Lear offer key psychological and symbolic insights into the motives and internal landscapes of important characters. In his A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the characters undergo enchantments while sleeping, this causes them to act go against their normal states. Shakespeare also used dreams as devices in Henry IV, Measure for Measure and The Tempest. One of my favorite excerpts from Shakespeare in which he mentions dreams is in his Soliloquy from Hamlet’s “Nunnery Scene”:

To be, or not to be, that is the question—
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them? To die, to