Can you control your dreams?

Dreams have been of paramount importance to cultures throughout the ages.  Lucid dreaming isn't new either. According to the podcast, Aristotle may have been the first to write about lucid dreaming, although he didn't have a term for it. And some Tibetan Buddhists have been practicing something like lucid dreaming for a very long time. They used to call it dream yoga.

A Dutch psychiatrist named Frederik van Eeden came up with the term for lucid dreams in 1913. He claimed that there are nine types of dreams in all, including ordinary, symbolic and vivid dreams. Lucid dreams often times involve flying.

Lucid dreaming occurs during the REM sleep, the fifth sleep stage. During this stage our body becomes motionless, with the exception of the eyelids. So, through the movement of our eyes, we can determine if a person is dreaming or not.

According to the podcast, we aren't sure what's going on in our brain during lucid dreaming. One prediction is that maybe the part of our brain which is connected to our logic is supposed to be "asleep," but it's possible that it "wakes up" while REM sleep, so that dreaming and logic are both working at the same time, enabling the dreamer to recognize the dream situation for what it is.

The grand idea of lucid dreaming is all about control. In your dream, you could consciously decide to visit a specific place, say, Italy, France -- and your dream would obey the waking mind. The possibility of controlling the mind even in sleep has led some researchers to consider lucid dreaming as a treatment for nightmares. One study showed that lucid dreaming helped a group of people having nightmares to have them less often.

There is a great debate over the subject of dream control. The majority of scientists say that it's not possible. But there are some scientists who argue that there's so much we don't know about the human mind that we can't make any conclusive judgments one way or the other.

According to the podcast there are several techniques that can help you to have lucid dreams. The first suggestion was to keep a diary near your bed. And when you wake up, write down what you have seen. Another good technique is that when you wake up from your dream, try to recall it. And when you go back to your sleep again, you keep in mind that you are going to see the same dream and it is quiet feasible, that you will go on dreaming the same dream.

This episode was very interesting for me, as I see dreams mostly every day. And the interesting fact is that sometimes I wake up and don’t see the whole dream. Then maybe after a week I can see the rest of my dream. Another interesting fact was that in the podcast one of the speakers said that once he saw a dream, where his teeth were pulling out of his mouth, it was amazing, as I have seen the same dream too. It was like a nightmare, and the awful thing is that I was seeing the same dream mostly every night for 3 months. Maybe it was connected with stress or I don’t know what, but, fortunately, I haven’t seen that dream for a long and I hope I will never see it again.

Individual differences: Deviance

My today’s post is based on  David Crystal "Encyclopedia of the English Language". I am going to talk about individual differences and deviances.

Individuality in language is a complex matter as each person has his own way of speaking. These differences arise depending on the variations in sex, physique, personality, background interest, and experience. Physical condition is important particularly in the terms of voice quality, as it is connected with the structure of our body and physique.

Another factors that influence our speech are educational history, occupational experience, and personal skills or tastes. They have impact on the use of habitual words and turn of phrases or certain kind of grammatical constructions. In my previous post I was talking about occupational varieties, where I mentioned that one’s occupation or profession has a great role on the way one speaks. Meaning that during your work, you involve some professional words into your lexicon, which, subsequently, become the part of the word stock you use while talking.

Personality also is observed in conversation, as some people are considered as very good conversationalists, while others are not very good at conversations. Some people are good at storytelling, letter writing, good speech making. While there are people who lack of these abilities. But in my opinion, not all of these factors are important in our everyday conversations, for example it is not important to be a good orator in order to interact with people, as the aim of our everyday speech is to share meanings and ideas.

Talking about individual differences in conversation, I would like to mention gender differences in conversation. I have written a literature review on this topic, so I can say that one’s gender also has a great role on the way one speaks, as men and women interpret the same thing differently (Tannen,1990).

i would like to share a short video, in order to make my post more interesting. This is a one minute video about individual differences in language learning.

Now I would like to talk about deviance. The notion of individual difference, which doesn’t conform to a rule or norm, is an aspect of what is commonly referred to as deviance.

Deviance produces instances which are totally unacceptable. For example please thanks, cat the etc.

There are different levels of deviance - degrees of departure from the norms which identify the various varieties of English, and from the structures they have in common. Slight degrees of deviance will be hard to identify.

In my opinion deviancy is hard to identify in our oral speech, as some people talk very fast and you should be very attentive in order to notice them, but in written language, they are noticed easier.

How mirror works

Today I have listened to a very interesting podcast about mirrors (http://www.howstuffworks.com/). According to it, people look at mirrors very often. Mirrors are able to reflect the full picture of a person.

 In ancient times people were going to ponds in order to see their reflections. Historians say, that first mirrors were found 6000 BC, in Turkey, Anatolia.
But it wasn’t like the contemporary mirror. They used polished obsidian as a reflective surface. Eventually, they started to produce more sophisticated mirrors made of copper, bronze, silver, gold and even lead. Mirrors like the contemporary ones did not come into being until the late Middle Ages. But at that time it was very difficult to make them and they were very expensive. It wasn't until the Renaissance, when the Florentines invented an easier way of making mirrors. They were more elaborated and were very clear. Moreover artists started to use them. Mirrors helped to emerge a new form of art: the self-portrait. The mirror makers were keeping the way of making them in a secret, moreover, their secrets were so precious, that who tried to sell their knowledge to foreign workshops were killed.

At this point, mirrors were still only affordable for the rich, but scientists had noticed some alternative uses for them in the meantime. As early as the 1660s, mathematicians noted that mirrors could potentially be used in telescopes.

The modern mirror is made by silvering, or spraying a thin layer of silver or aluminum onto the back of a sheet of glass. Mirrors can preserve the image that hit it, but they reflect the image in a reversed way. Imagine writing something on a sheet of paper in dark pen and then holding it up to a mirror. It looks backward.

I have found many interesting legends about mirrors on the web. They mirrors reflect our souls.

As the vampires do not have souls, they are not reflected in mirrors. Mirrors are covered out of respect for the dead during the Jewish mourning ritual of sitting shiva, but many people in the U.S., also in Armenia, cover their mirrors when someone dies. According to superstition, a mirror can trap a dying soul. A woman who gives birth and looks in a mirror too soon afterward will also see ghostly faces peek out from behind her reflection. What's more, rumor has it that if you go to a mirror on New Year's Eve with a candle in your hand and call out the name of a dead person in a loud voice, the power of the mirror will show you that person's face.

These are just rumors: don’t take them very close to your heart!

If you are interested in how the mirrors are made you can watch this video, that i have shared. I hope you will like it!

Occupational Varieties: Religious English

According to David Crystal Encyclopedia, the term “occupational dialect” is used as a specific language, which is associated with one’s occupation and profession. The linguistic features of occupational varieties may be as distinctive, as regional or class features, but they are only in temporary use.  They are part of a job, after which one do not use those words.
There are some people whose work has become part of their lives and personality, and have influenced their behavior, linguistically as well as socially, which means that they may use those words even after their work. But mostly when we stop working we stop using the language of work.

Any domain could be used to illustrate occupational linguistic distinctiveness, or identity (starting with factory workers, ending with doctors or musicians). The distinctive word stock used by a special group of the same occupation, develops a slang and jargon which set them apart from outsiders. Jargon or Argot comprise a special category of words, which are used by a certain group of people who pertain to a specific field of science, profession, trade, occupation, etc. (Fromkin, Rodman, & Hyams, 2007). The more an occupation is a part of a long-established tradition, the more it is likely to have accreted linguistic rituals which its members accept as a criterion of performance.

Now, I would like to talk about Religious English. There is a unique phonological identity in such genres as spoken by prayers, sermons, chants and litanies, including the unusual case of unison speech. There Is a strong grammatical identity, lexical identity, and highly distinctive discourse identity .

There are three main reasons that show why Religious English is probably the most distinctive of all occupational varieties.

The first reason is that it is consciously retrospective, in the way it constantly harts back to its origins. The next reason is that it is consciously prescriptive, concerned with issues of orthodoxy and identity, both textual and ritual. And, finally, it is consciously imaginative and exploratory, as people make their personal response to the claims of religious belief.

Although many commentators point to similarities between religious and legal English (in the way that historical tradition has sanctioned the use of archaism and ritual dialogue), religion occupational variety has far more formally identifiable subvarieties than any other use of English.

How hate works

In my previous post I discussed smile: how it makes everything easy and makes us feel good. Today I will write about hate and how it works.

According to my podcast there are three type of hate. The first one they called “just hate”, when you hate something and do nothing about it. In my opinion it can be referred to as an “innocent hate”.  The next type of hate is called ''a real hate'', which is based on fear. And, finally, the third type of hate is the result of anger. According to the podcast some people think that hate and anger can be considered as the same things, but there are others, that are sure that there are certain differences between hate and anger. They say that hate is brought on by humiliation, ill-treatment or being devalued, while anger is brought up by frustration. But others argue, saying that when people hate, it may also be the result of frustration. Thus, it is not true to say that frustration brings only to hatred.  As for me, I think that they do differ from each other definitely. As one can be angry with somebody, but he doesn't have to hate him. I can bring some examples from our everyday life, e.g.  When the taxi is late, you get very angry with the driver, but that doesn't mean that you hate him. After you leave the car you forget the driver. This means that anger is a short-term psychological condition, while hate is a long-lasting

The podcast presents a study which was conducted in 2008, in London University.  They polled 70 people and 90% said that there is someone who they hate. Then they showed them the pictures of people they hated. They found out that the area of cortex in our brain, which is associated with judgment and critical thinking, started to activate. While when you see the picture of someone you love, this area of the cortex remains less active. When you see someone you hate, you tend to criticize them.

It is important to talk about group hate. In recent modern history there are some vivid examples of group hate, for example during the period of World War II fascists were making people to hate others. They were giving a lot of data by identifying the drawbacks of the others and making them hate and act like they hate them. It is called brain washing.

A question may arise in our mind. Is hate a mental illness? Our understanding of hate is incomplete because our understanding of the things that we do that we associate with hate is also incomplete. There was a study which showed the percentages of people who people hate most. Friends make up 23%, family members 12%, ex-boyfriends 12%, within the family fathers are hated 40%, mothers 20%, mothers in laws 30%, and, finally, siblings 3%.

I really hope that these percentages will decrease over time, as I believe, that the less there will be hate in our lives the happier we will live.