Reviews for Three Dollar Dreams

The average rating for Three Dollar Dreams based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-04-23 00:00:00 Cynthia Winter Did not finish at page 21 Heads up! This is a long rant First of all, let me say, this is not my usual reading material. I’m reading this for an “intellectual book club” I just started with my library, which is basically where people read intelligent books such as textbooks and journals that are published in anthologies. Intelligent books. And they started with this. Note, that although it sounds like it, I’m not knocking the knowledge behind dreams. It’s something that has been studied for a long time, and although I don’t personally believe in it, I just simply mean that something like this probably shouldn’t be considered for what is basically a book club that reads text books to get smarter. There’s still a lot to be researched and studied about dreams and I await the day dream laboratories drop us some more knowledge on what they’ve learned in recent studies. Anyway, I don’t believe in dreams and how they can affect or know that things are going to happen. Although I’ve had a few things that could be called premonitions, the more likely explanation of this is that I dreamt something similar – walking down the street with friends, a street I’ve walked down before and dreamt of, and then walked down that street with a number of people and connected it to my previous dream, creating a feeling of deja vu and a wonder if I just predicted the future; I just don’t believe in it. The reason for this, purely, is because the dreams that people say, the fact that we need to take this up and coming opportunity that we have no idea what it is, for instance, would mean that, to some degree, we have the ability to predict the future. There is no scientific measures or proof to show that people can do this in any form. Although the psychic community exists, I don’t believe that everyone would have this power. I don’t even know if I 100% believe the psychic community has this power. Definitely something to be further explored in the scientific world, but until we get refutable proof, I just cannot believe that dreams have a way to predict the future, and tell you how to live our lives. Dreams are a creation of our subconscious memory, ie. the past. To think that a memory can predict the future with no proof is, in my opinion, rather ridiculous. So please do not expect this review to be “wow dreams are amazing, this book is the gospel!”; I’m more reviewing the scientific side, and the research done, simply because I have no interest or belief in the power of dreams predicting the future and such. If you believe that dreams help shape your life then by all means, this book will be great for you. Dee has obviously done a lot of research into the dream scene, and what significant things mean, and even has a large dictionary of items and images that supposedly have significance in dreams. For someone reading this for the main part of finding out what their dreams do mean, this is the absolutely perfect book. No, the thing about this book that intrigues me is one line in the more scientific part of the book: the less interaction there is between people, and the less stimuli received from external contact, the less sleep is needed. This made me stop and think quite a bit. I am, by all intent and purposes, a hermit. I don’t go out unless I have to. Even going to my book club once a month makes me incredibly anxious. If I can do something online rather than leave the house, I will do it. If I don’t 100% need this item, then no way am I leaving the house to go and get it. Walking the dogs? Not something I can actively do without panicking and returning to my house within five or ten minutes. My doctor recently diagnosed me with insomnia, and prescribed me sleeping pills – a topic that Dee does actually cover in brief. This is what sparked my interest in this book – and I will definitely be going on from this to read some books and textbooks on the science of sleeping. Whilst I was on holiday, I was constantly around people. I was going out on excursions with people, I was up most nights drinking with family, even if I wasn’t up all night, I was still with people. No matter the time of day, until I returned to my room to merely wash or sleep, I was with people. On holiday, I was constantly tired. I could hardly keep my eyes open when I got back to the room, even the night I went to bed at only 7.30pm because I was doing a scuba dive the next day at 9am. I was thoroughly exhausted every night. Now I’m back off of holiday, and readjusted to English time, I’m fully awake again. My Mom I hardly see because she’s always at work – we see each other for about two – three hours a day when we catch up on our joint television shows in the evening. I don’t have any friends close by I can go visit. All the people I talk to at the moment are online friends, and I just can’t sleep. It gets to 3, 4am and I’m not tired in the least, until my Mom wakes up and has a mild go at me for being awake, which makes me retaliate, we have a minor argument, and then I get tired after that, and now that makes sense. The external stimuli that exhausts us must be done throughout the day; these stimuli end up overloading the sleep centre at the base of our brains, which then creates the feeling of fatigue and exhaustion and the need to sleep. Maybe this is the kick up the back side I need to get off my ass and try being a bit more social. Probably won’t be. Probably should be. Other than this, the rest of the scientific information is already known, to me, at least, and probably most psychology students. Following on from a break down of what REM and NREM sleep is, the book becomes heavily biased, indicating the mere importance of dreams, concluding that we sleep to dream. As someone who has studied science for almost their whole life, I can tell you for a fact that no such conclusion has yet been made and dream laboratories are still trying to find the meaning of why we sleep. There are numerous different things that could mean we sleep. Dee even tries to knock down the hypothesis that we sleep to rest our body, simply because we move around in our sleep and stretch our muscles. Although this would not be considered resting by many people, and we still get the same amount of rest when just sitting and, for example, reading, this movement during sleep is purely to stop our muscles locking up and making it impossible for us to sit up and move around once we wake up. It is basic sleep science knowledge; it’s one of the first things I ever learned when studying the human body and sleep in biology, and I would have expected Dee to have at least done research into that, and the other hypothesis they knocked down, rather than trying to twist hypothesis and make it seem like dreaming is 100% important to our existence and survival. There are many, many reasons and hypothesis currently being tested as to why humans sleep, and we are knocking them off one by one, but for now, there is just no way of simply saying “we sleep to dream” because, no one knows! If this was the main thing as to why we slept, scientists would be telling us all to get X amount of sleep a night because we need Y amount of REM sleep to ensure we grow healthy and continue to be “well” humans, and to stay healthy. I haven’t seen any scientist or doctor say this, other than a healthy amount of sleep for children, teenagers, and adults is X, Y and Z, and none of this has been said to be so we can dream. Merely stating this one hypothesis is the real reason and the “only conclusion”, for me, definitely knocks credit and makes this book much more unbelievable for the main fact that – Dee brushed off other hypothesis, without an explanation of “oh we do this so it can’t be right” when that thing we do, can easily be explained – such as stretching our muscles around in our sleep. Coming on from this point is now the point Dee makes that, when we dream, we could well [visit] the source from whence we came before we were born, and the place to which we return when we die. Do babies, therefore, who dream for most of their early life, revisit this source, our spiritual home? When we dream, it comes from the subconscious memory; most of the time, it’s actually the day’s events we relive in our head, which is the mind’s way of moving events into the subconscious, and therefore allowing us to remember them. Uneventful things, such as having the same lunch every day, are often not remembered – it’s routine, and it’s in the subconscious memory many times, and so the mind does not believe it needs to store this time once again. But for instance, on your usual walk home from work or school, you see someone fall off their bike. You remember this, because it’s not a usual occurrence, it’s something different, and so you may dream about falling, or someone else falling, because it’s connecting with the subconscious to remember this new detail. Again, science has not proved that there is some spiritual birth place where we all come from. If you believe in one, that’s totally fine! My religion, personally, does not have a place where we come from to be born, or somewhere we go when we die, and that’s my personal beliefs. But until I see some proof that there is this plain of souls somewhere, waiting to be picked to be shoved into someone’s womb, I cannot believe that when we dream, we revisit some spiritual plane that we all came from. Although this is first stated as a possibility, Dee’s writing goes on to continue the “Not all dreams, of course, are profound journeys to the great beyond.” I’m sorry. I really am, I can see where you’re coming from I really can, but there is just no proof as it stands that any dreams are journeys to this “great beyond”. Although I can understand the want to believe in something like this, there is just no proof that this even happens. This isn’t a religion, so in my opinion, Dee should not be preaching this in a way that makes it sound like “you have to believe in this” and “this religious-toned thing does exist”. It’s infuriating. I had to did not finish this because, as you can see, this review is just from 21 pages. Can you imagine if I read the entire book? I just have a lot of problems with this, where Dee seems to be shoving her own beliefs as gospel down the reader’s throat, and it’s leaving a bad taste in my mouth. I just can’t get into this and this is one book my book club will never get me to read. Shelving this. Can’t deal with it any more.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-06-30 00:00:00 Daniel Boyd What? You don't know me!