Sleep
Night visions
Dreams, those secret landscapes submerged beneath sleep’s sea, were once thought to be visitations from gods assuming the shapes of humans, animals and inanimate objects. Though we no longer believe Morpheus and his brothers control the tide of images that flood our dozing minds, dreams have lost little of their mystery. So what happens when your child sails off to slumber? And how do the events of the day — and night — influence her unconscious life? Dream House Patricia Garfield, a San Francisco-area psychologist and author of The Dream Book: A Young Person’s Guide to Understanding Dreams , offers this analogy: “I think of a dream as a three-storey house,” she says, with the physical body located in the basement, thoughts and feelings on the first floor, and spiritual connections (including dreams of God and departed loved ones) in the attic. The release of acetylcholine (a chemical messenger linked to learning and memory) in the brain switches on the furnace that fires dreaming. Produced naturally in large amounts during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, acetylcholine can also induce dreaming when it’s artificially administered.