A Little Bedtime Research on Dreams

Although most people will tell you that dreams foreshadow the future and that they can also tell us about our past, my research resource, Webster Dictionary Online, defines dream as a visionary creation of the imagination. Who is correct?

When I started researching the word dream, I had some difficulty, on the EBSCO software, finding my word. I had to try several different synonyms. After many tries, I finally found an article-"Purple Moon" written by Paul Alto. When I looked in The Riverside SHAKESPEARE. I had trouble finding the play containing the speech that included my word.

I found information on my word in the King James Version of The Holy Bible to be helpful. Job 33:15 contained my word on page 437. "In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed." I think this information is trying to say that a dream is a vision, not a creation of the imagination. I agree with The Holy Bible.

I discovered a poem entitled "A Dream" by Edgar Allan Poe at the website http://library.utoronto.ca/www/utel/rp/indexauthor.html. Poe is expressing his sorrow until he has a holy dream that cheered him up and destroyed his sorrow. I like this poem and think Poe was a great poet.

In Roget's II The New Thesaurus, I found several synonyms including: fancy, fantasy (phantasy), fiction, figment, illusion, phantasm (phantasma), reverie, and vision (p. 568). These synonyms were helpful when I tried to find dream in EBSCO software.

In Familiar Quotations, I found the quote-"The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream-he awoke and found it truth" on page 417. This quote refers to a dream as compared to imagination. It then goes on to say the dream was the truth. Does this not agree with the theory that dreams have something to do with your life and are not just a figment of your imagination?

In The Riverside SHAKESPEARE, (page 1063) the drama Romeo and Juliet used the word dream in Act I, Scene III, Lines 63-67. Lady Capulet: "Marry, that 'marry' is the theme I came to talk of. Tell me, daughter Juliet, How stands your disposition to be married?" Juliet: "It is an [honor] that I dream not of." Nurse: "An [honor]! Were not I thine only nurse, I would say thou hadst suck'd wisdom from thy teat." Juliet is replying that "to be married" is not her dream. Her nurse agrees. I think that this speech is an independent act of revolution and portrays Juliet as a role model for all girls and women.

Finally, I feel more knowledgeable about the word dream than I did before I began my research. I learned about the history of my word and how it changed over time. I discovered several useful synonyms and definitions for my word, and I saw how my word could be used in famous plays, quotations, and poems that are valuable to English literature. It has been time well spent learning more about dreams.

Alto, Paul. "Purple Moon." EBSCO MAGAZINE ARTICLE SUMMARIES. Vers. 3.42a. Computer software. EBSCO Publishing, 1997. MS-DOS 6.2, CD-ROM.

Bartlett, John. Familiar Quotations. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951.

"Dream." Online. Internet. 10 Dec. 1998. Available http://www.oed-narp.com/oedframe1.html.

"Dream." Online. Internet. 11 Dec. 1998. Available http://www.m-w.com/dictionary.html.

Evans, G. The Riverside SHAKESPEARE. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "A Dream." First Pub. Date: 1827. Online. Internet. 9 Dec. 1998. Available http://library.utoronto.ca/www/utel/rp/indexauthors.html.

Roget's II The New Thesaurus. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980.

Spevack, M. The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare. Massachusetts: Cambridge, 1973.

Strong, James. The New Strong's Exhaustive Concordance to the Bible. Tennessee: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1982.

The Holy Bible. King James Version.