In the murky netherworld of sleep, you may find yourself falling to an inexplicable demise, shot by a stranger, strangled, hit by a car, suffocated, knifed, blown to pieces, beheaded, disemboweled or otherwise disembodied; in other words, you may dream that you die. So what does it mean?

Despite the urban legend turned into Hollywood myth that if you die in your dream you will die in real life, death in dreams is a fairly common phenomena and it doesn’t always portend negative omens.  Practitioners of dream interpretation, ranging from Freud and Jung to more recent do-it-yourself gurus, indicate that waking from a dream in which you have died is the usual outcome; in fact, one hundred percent of those who have reported dying in their dreams  also woke up to find themselves among the living.

To understand what dying in your dream means, however, is a matter of dream interpretation, not of popular legend or cinematic mythology.  The answer to the question, however, may depend on who is doing the dream interpretation.

Early psychoanalytic thought beginning with Freud was revolutionary in its symbolic use of dream interpretation in understanding the psychology of the human person. For Freud, death in dreams was a direct route to understanding the sexual impetus that for him subsides in the unconscious, where it is repressed during waking hours.  So for Freud, dying in your own dream might be a sign that one is disgusted with oneself, or of shame for some act one has committed. He thought that usually death in dreams is derived from the natural desire that boys have to murder their fathers, and take their places beside their mothers, a desire strongly repressed in adult life.

Jung, on the other hand, had a more complex theory of dream interpretation that was not nearly so dependent upon Freud’s preoccupation with sexual desire.  Jung saw his own death in his dreams on one occasion to be representative of the shadow self, the ego, which had to be killed before he would ever truly reach a point of authentic self-awareness.

The art of dream interpretation, sprouting from early psychoanalysis, has lately taken a back stage to more prominent methods of therapy and self-discovery. There remains, however, some use of dream interpretation in psychoanalysis, but it is especially prominent among those who follow new age teaching, shamanic experiences, claims by psychics or practitioners of the occult, or among those who follow a drug-induced method for seeking meaningful experiences. Of these, a very popular dream interpretation of the death of oneself is the idea that it signifies an impending change. According to this popular view, the person who dreams of his own death is expressing an awareness of a new stage of development, or an impending, important change about to take place in his life.

Some who are faced with terminal illness have also reported having very pleasant and comforting dreams of their own death, which may be the psyche’s way of preparing the individual for the inevitability of that permanent change.

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Have you ever noticed how easy it is for the mind to dwell on negative thoughts, or how hard it is for the mind to be grateful? Thoughts tend to enter the mind unbidden and to control one’s mood, and therefore one’s behavior. Anyone who has ever suffered from insomnia, or who struggles with depression, or who has to fight various addictions, knows the difficulty of controlling the influence of thoughts that enter the mind, and that in some cases seem to exert control over the whole person.

For a long time scientists, including cognitive behaviorists and others, have believed that the mind is controlled by external circumstances, or the environment.  The idea is that the way you were raised more or less totally shapes the way you think. What is happening around you controls what happens in the mind. Others assert that the mind creates various thoughts and emotions completely based on chemical processes that occur in certain sections of the brain.

More recent theories, however, suggest that the mind and the brain are far more flexible than anyone had imagined.  While both environment and genetic or chemical processes certainly are involved in the way the mind operates, or the way the brain functions, it may be that the brain is more than the passive object in the way the mind actually works. Rather than understanding the way we experience life through the mind as a direct result of what is happening in the brain, recent discoveries have shown that it is possible that the mind can influence the way the brain itself is hardwired.

In the late 1990s a scientist at Princeton named Elizabeth Gould found that the brain is more malleable than previously thought, and that new neurons and new connections could be created through learning new behaviors. In other words, rather than the mind influencing the way we act (for instance, negative thoughts creating foul moods and bad behaviors), actions could also influence the connections the brain makes, and therefore the way the mind thinks.

Another scientist named Richard Davidson from the University of Wisconsin built upon this discovery and found that changing the way one thinks can rewire the way the brain works. In other words, the traditional assumptions had it wrong: the brain does not, through genetics or chemical processes, have absolute control over the mind and therefore over the way we think and feel, but the mind can actually change the way the brain is wired, so that we can be less reactive to intrusive thoughts and more stable in the way we live and behave.

One of the primary methods Davidson used in his inquiry into the way the mind and brain function together was through mindfulness meditation. He discovered that the monks of the Dalai Lama generated far more gamma waves than other, average, healthy people. Those who practice meditation tend to use the mind to physically change the hardwiring in the brain in such a way that far more positive thoughts and emotions are generated than negative ones.  The implications are extraordinary. Not only is there a potential for naturally overcoming intrusive thoughts, which sometimes result in mental disorders, but also for healing Alzheimer disease and other afflictions that are rooted in brain functions.

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Nature is Against You

While your mind can be your biggest ally in your struggle to lose weight, it can also sabotage your efforts in ways you might not even know about. It can be quietly working in the background subconsciously, undoing all the good you do consciously. There are a lot of physiological and psychological factors that make us want to eat, and understanding these, and learning how to counteract them are paramount to losing weight.

Before you try any diet, consider the following:

• Your body is designed to process food efficiently. That means that your body naturally regulates your metabolism to be quick when you have a lot of food, and slow when you don’t have as much.
• No amount of willpower will make you not want fatty and refined foods. The mind is hardwired by evolution to want these things, because they translate into easy, quick energy. Celery, on the other hand, requires a lot more work for the body to get nutrients from.
• It’s common to resist physical activity. The mind is telling you not to work out, because it means you will be using up energy to no purpose. Your brain is trying to tell you to save that energy in case you need to hunt, or run from a predator.
• Cleanse and Flush diets aren’t doing anything that your body is not doing already. We have a liver, kidneys, and a pancreas to flush out toxins for us.
• The mind closely associates food with comfort, because plentiful food is an indicator of security. It’s common to eat food in order to feel safe and comfortable.

The mind gets its cues from your genes

Your mind also tends to trick you into eating with hormones and chemicals. A diet high in fatty and highly processed foods works in much the same way a drug might. An injection of, for example, highly refined flours and sugars in a piece of cake will cause your blood sugar to spike, and will also cause a release of Dopamine, which your body translates as a small high. When you come down from that high, you become depressed, which will cause you to want to eat more fatty processed foods in order to get that feeling again. To fight this kind of cycle, willpower alone just won’t cut it. Find a way to remove yourself from these situations. Don’t keep these foods at home, or make it difficult to go get them (for example, by parking your bike behind you car, so that going out to grab fast food will require moving it, or just taking the bike.) You can also fight this by keeping yourself distracted in an activity, like playing a video game, or working on a hobby project.

The mind can tempt you to eat when you don’t need to in several ways. One of the biggest self-defeating culprits is rationalization. It’s that voice in your head that says, “This one piece of candy won’t hurt; you’ve been working out so regularly!” or “Go ahead and have that extra serving of dinner…you did an extra half mile on the treadmill this morning!” And the worst part of rationalization is, that it usually works. Your mind is making you fat, and you don’t even know it.

One way to avoid the rationalization pitfalls (and the guilt that usually accompanies it) is to set more realistic goals for yourself. If you’ve put yourself on a strict diet and exercise regime, for instance, go ahead and build in a few rewards for yourself. Having a predetermined reward as a goal to shoot for sets your mind up to build up towards the end game, to not have to “cheat” to get what it wants anyway. Say you’re on the treadmill for an hour a day, with a limited calorie diet to look forward to every day for the next few months. Try working in a day a month where you get to go off-diet, even just a little, as a reward for the consistent effort you have put in all the other days. If your mind doesn’t feel like it’s cheating, you’ll avoid the guilt that might also be making you fat. Guilty eating as a result of bad work/rewards ratios is as difficult a problem to overcome as the overeating in general. No matter what is at work in your brain putting food in your mouth that is not healthy for you or is making you fat, you can counteract the effects by making more positive decisions on goal-making.

Another hurdle to fairly easily overcome is that of “self-talk.” That’s where you tell yourself negative things like, “You’ll never lose the weight; you’re too fat” or “You can’t do this because you’re worthless.” The mind trick here is to stop the talk in its tracks. If you hear negative talking in your head, you say to yourself, “I would not let a stranger say these things to me, therefore, I do not have permission to say them to myself.” It is positive reinforcement towards your self-image that can play an important role in not only helping you to keep working at your weight loss, but at life in general. A positive mental attitude will help with your confidence and ability to make more healthy decisions for you. If you think that you deserve to feel better and look better, then your chances of making exactly that happen are greatly improved.

Remember, forgive yourself for mistakes, set more realistic goals and don’t let your mind sabotage your good intentions.

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I want to remember everything as I get older!

Science continues to expand our understanding of how the brain works. This mysterious organ that drives the entire machine suffers from being greatly misunderstood. Here are ten common misconceptions about the brain that should set you straight.

1. Humans only use 10% of their brain. Perhaps one of the greatest misconceptions of our time, this myth is empirically false. Originating from the idea that perhaps only about 10% of the neurons of the brain are operating at any given moment, but this concept is decidedly different than not using the other 90%. The truth is closer to the idea that we only push ourselves to about 10% of our entire capacity.

2. Video games will damage the brain. In this day and age of video gaming, this myth is also fairly inaccurate. Even though the advent of video gaming is a recent phenomenon and there is not a great deal of study about it, researchers have found the playing video games actually teaches your brain to process information in great amounts and much faster, thus improving brain power.

My brain can only take so much!

3. The bigger the better. There has never been any substantial evidence that the size on one’s brain makes you smarter. Men’s brains are by a rule larger than women’s, thereby debunking this myth immediately. If the brain is not used, it won’t matter what the size.

4. A damaged brain cannot regenerate. Science now has empirical evidence that the brain can engage in neurogenesis, a form of cellular rebuilding, although it’s not guaranteed.

5. Aging leads to a loss of memory. While it is a common condition, it is not a given that age will weaken the ability to remember. An active brain can be exercised with regular thinking and a healthy diet.

6. The brain is riddled with holes. A completely false mythology, referring perhaps instead to the parts of the brain where neurons are not firing.

7. Depression begins in the brain. This is not only a myth but a dangerous one as well. People who believe that depression is just a series of “bad thoughts” can do real harm. Depression is a much more complicated condition caused by any number of reasons. No one decides to be depressed.

I never knew all this goes on inside my head.

8. Left Brain, Right Brain. The truth is, no one operates from solely the left or right brain. Some people may be stronger on one side or the other, but all humans use both sides of the brain.

9. The brain is a giant computer. Just the opposite, the brain is so much more complicated than any computer, that it’s an insult to one’s brain to make this comparison. It was probably started because the first computers were roughly based on what was known about the brain at the time.

10. We learn better through a subliminal approach. While listening to information while in a relaxed or even sleep state works well for some, it is just as likely that it won’t work for others. We all learn in our own best way.

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