Unit-5-Dreams新编大学英语第二版第二册课文翻译.docxVIP

Unit 5 Dreams Are You a Dreamer? 1 Dreams — why do we have them? Do they mean anything? Is there such a thing as a dream in which the events seen by the dreamer come true? Such questions have interested people for thousands of years. Scientific advances in the past few decades have revealed more about the physical process of sleep, but they still dont offer any final answers to the many questions about dreams that continue to puzzle us. Everyone dreams —its just that some of us cant remember doing so. Recordings of human brain waves show that we all go into dream mode when we fall asleep. We dream for most of the night, but were only able to remember our dreams if we happen to wake up while we are still in REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. This is when we dream. We have four or five REM stages of sleep during the night, the first occurring about 90 minutes after we fall asleep. After that, our dreaming periods recur every 90 minutes and last between 15 to 45 minutes, getting longer as the night progresses. The main purpose of sleeping (apart from giving us rest) may be to allow us to dream —to review our lives, our worries and hopes in a totally different way, and to get an unconscious view of ourselves, getting rid of material from our memories that we no longer need. Some dreams may have a simple physiological cause. Dreaming of walking on hot coals, for example, may well be caused by sleeping with your feet too close to a heater. And the frustrating dream in which you try to run but your legs wont move may be explained by bedding that is too tight. Anyone who sleeps through their alarm may well dream of doorbells or telephones ringing. All are simple examples of how the unconscious works with our conscious mind to guide and advise us. 5 But such physiological explanations are not enough to tell us why we dream. Some people believe that dreams are total nonsense, merely the result of the misfiring of electrical impulses in the brain, while on th