History Of Dream Catchers (Indian Dreamcatchers)

The history of dream catchers (or Indian dreamcatchers) can be traced to the Native American Ojibway Chippewa tribe. The Ojibways would tie strands of sinew string around a frame of bent wood that was in a small round or tear drop shape. The patterns of the dream catcher would be similar to how the Ojibways tied the webbing for their snowshoes (the Ojibways were located far enough north that they experienced all four seasons)..

Traditionally, Indian dream catchers were only a few inches across and it would be finished with a feather hanging from the webbing. Wrapping the frame in leather would also be common.

Originally, dream catchers were made as a charm to protect sleeping children from nightmares. The legend is that the dream catcher will catch one’s dreams during the night. Bad dreams will get caught in the dream catcher’s webbing and disappear with the morning sun.

Meanwhile, good dreams will find their way to the center of the dream catcher and float down the feather. The dream catcher is therefore considered a filter allowing only good, pleasant dreams to get through. Dream catchers are also believed to bless those who are sleeping with good luck and harmony.

Dream catchers started to get popular in other Native Indian tribes such as Cherokee, Lakota and Navajo. Today, dream catchers are made in practically every Native Indian tribe in the United States and Canada. Pretty well any Native Indian event such as pow wows or festivals will have authentic dream catchers for sale. The dream catcher was even featured in an episode of the Star Trek Voyageur television science fiction series.

However, like many other Native Indian crafts, cheaply made dream catchers have been recently mass produced by non-natives and foreign souvenir producers in Asia. So it is very important when shopping on the internet for a Native Indian dreamcatcher that one deals only with reputable businesses dealing with authentic dream catchers made by Native Indian artisans.

In addition to children’s nurseries, dream catchers today are hung in windows, heads of beds, walls and even on the rear view mirrors of vehicles.

Clint Leung is owner of Free Spirit Gallery (http://www.FreeSpiritGallery.ca) , an online gallery specializing in Inuit Eskimo and Northwest Native American art including carvings, sculpture and prints. Free Spirit Gallery has numerous information resource articles with photos of authentic Inuit and Native Indian art as well as free eCards.

Interesting Dream Facts From the Scientific to the Surreal

Dreams or dreaming have always been a part of man's life. So ordinary it is that some people would feel deprived if they didn't have a dream or two for a particular night. For as long as a person lives, he surely would have a dream story to tell. Dream stories that are sometimes easy to understand, although usually vague and even weird.

Many consider dreams as an essential part of man's life. In fact, many scientists believe that dreaming has co-existed with man. In the course of our history, we see records about great men and women and their incredible dreams. Some of these dreams have even become integral to the shaping of our history.

But while man has long been sharing a history with dreams, not much has been made to make the ordinary man fully understand dreams or dreaming. Many great personages have dedicated much of their lives to discover what dreams are and why they happen. Many people have also tried to decipher the meaning of dreams. All of them, however, seem to have come short of making dreams and their meaning clear to the ordinary person.

Not all was put to waste, however, for all of these oneirologists and oneiromancists. Today, we have a great deal of accepted facts that try to explain dreams, why they happen and what they mean. Today, we have a large collection of interesting dream facts coming from different sources. These facts ranges from the scientific to the surreal. In this article, we try to present a few of them.

Fact # 1: Everybody dreams.

Dreaming has always been associated with REM sleep, which is that part of the sleep cycle where we sleep the deepest. Thus, for as long as a person undergoes REM sleep, he would actually dream. Failure to recall a dream from sleep doesn't mean that the person did not dream at all.

Fact # 2: Dreams occur in all humans with about the same frequency per amount of sleep.

In normal sleeping (that is, a sleeping period of about 8 hours), a person would dream for an average of one to two hours. In this dreaming period, a person would normally have 4 to 7 dreams. So if an individual feels that he did not dream or had only one dream in a particular night, his must just be a case of poor dream recall.

Fact # 3: Five minutes after dreaming ends, half of its content is forgotten. After 10 minutes, 90% of the dream is erased from memory.

This explains why nightmares that cause us to suddenly wake up from sleep are more vividly recalled than other kind of dreams. This also explains why a person recalls his dream better if he is awoken from sleep by something (e.g. the sound of the radio, an alarm clock) than if he wakes up in the normal transition from sleeping to waking up.

Fact # 4: Blind people do dream.

While dreaming has always been associated with visual images remembered during sleep, vision is not the only sense that makes dreaming possible. Blind people also dream, and whether they dream of visual images or not depends on whether they are blind from birth or not. Most blind people, however, have dreams that are based on sound, taste and smell.

Fact # 5: Dreaming is not only for humans.

Recent studies have revealed that dreaming is not only experienced by humans; it is also experienced by animals. These studies show that animals, mammals in particular, exhibit the same brain actions in some parts of their sleep just as humans would do while dreaming. Except for those mammals that don't sleep at all, mammals do dream, although the subject of their dreams is hard to determine.

These five facts are just a few of the many interesting facts that our scientists have discovered about dreams and dreaming. Reading books about dream and searching the web for articles about dreams would introduce you to more of these facts. All of this information may not be enough to fully explain the nature of dreams and their meanings; but at least, they give us an idea of what the thing is and encourages us to know more of the interesting facts about dreams and dreaming.

About Author:

Jennifer Ambrose is the author of the ebook "Unlock the Mystery Of Your

Dreams" which teaches you how to interpret your dreams and understand

them. Download it at http://www.MysteryOfDreams.com