Question: I always face a problem of dreaming while sleeping at night. Thus, I cannot have a good quality of sleep, and I feel tired the next day. How can I stop dreaming?

Answer: Your question is unusual, because dreaming is an important part of good sleep and is also essential to good health. I discussed your situation with Rubin Naiman, Ph.D., a psychologist and author who specializes in integrative sleep and dream medicine, which he approaches from both a scientific and a spiritual perspective. He is on the faculty of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine. Read the rest of this entry »

"Am I awake or am I dreaming?" I ask myself for probably the hundredth time. I am fully awake, just like all the other times I asked, and to be honest I am beginning to feel a bit silly. All week I have been performing this "reality check" in the hope that it will become so ingrained in my mind that I will start asking it in my dreams too.

If I succeed, I will have a lucid dream – a thrilling state of consciousness somewhere between waking and sleeping in which, unlike conventional dreams, you are aware that you are dreaming and able to control your actions. Once you have figured this out, the dream world is theoretically your oyster, and you can act out your fantasies to your heart's content.

Journalistic interest notwithstanding, I am pursuing lucid dreaming for entertainment. To some neuroscientists, however, the phenomenon is of profound interest, and they are using lucid dreamers to explore some of the weirder aspects of the brain's behaviour during the dream state (see "Dream mysteries"). Their results are even shedding light on the way our brains produce our rich and complex conscious experience. Read the rest of this article

Are our dreams — those wild, fantastic and definitely uncensored jumbles of images that bombard us in our sleep — just a retweet of our day's events, or are they more?

And can you open your mind to the possibility that your dreams might actually come bearing gifts — valuable gifts that could help you gain guidance, solve problems and figure out your magic formula for meeting the man of your dreams or getting the raise you've been seeking? Read the rest of this article

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

- William Wordsworth

Regular contact with nature helps humanize us. We can know a sense of unity with all life by way of the sights and sounds of the natural world. This important spiritual element is often left out of discussions of why protecting the environment is a critical issue for our time.

If your hometown and home state are anything like mine, you know how much things have been changing. National parks are wonderful and important places of inspiration and heritage, but we don't live there. We are crowding nature out of our daily lives. Yet I believe that it is precisely here, at the borderlands and interchanges of our ordinary human activities with the natural landscape, that nature affects us most profoundly. Read the rest of this entry »

After 2,000 years of practice, Buddhist monks know that one secret to happiness is simply to put your mind to it.

What is happiness, and how can we achieve it?

Happiness can't be reduced to a few agreeable sensations. Rather, it is a way of being and of experiencing the world — a profound fulfillment that suffuses every moment and endures despite inevitable setbacks.

The paths we take in search of happiness often lead us to frustration and suffering instead. We try to create outer conditions that we believe will make us happy. But it is the mind itself that translates outer conditions into happiness or suffering. This is why we can be deeply unhappy even though we "have it all" — wealth, power, health, a good family, etc. — and, conversely, we can remain strong and serene in the face of hardship.
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