Have you ever said, “it’s only a dream”? While we often dismiss dreams, or fail to make room for them in the hurry of our daily lives, dreams can be a fabulous source of guidance, healing and juice for any day. Dreams offer us nine tremendous gifts.

1. We solve problems in our sleep
Jeff Taylor woke in the middle of the night from a dream in which he created an electronic bulletin board that was lit up with eager job-hunters logging in from all over the map. He scrawled the phrase “Monster board” on a pad in the dark, then rushed to an all-night coffee shop and roughed out the plan for what became the stunningly successful internet job agency, Monster.com

This book is about the revolutionary discovery that the human brain can change itself, as told through the stories of the scientists, doctors, and patients who have together brought about these astonishing transformations. Without operations or medications, they have made use of the brain’s hitherto unknown ability to change.

Some were patients who had what were thought to be incurable brain problems; others were people without specific problems who simply wanted to improve the functioning of their brains or preserve them as they aged. For four hundred years this venture would have been inconceivable because mainstream medicine and science believed that brain anatomy was fixed.

Here are some reflections on what science has to say about gratitude, which has been called the “forgotten factor” in happiness research.

Psychologists Robert Emmons at the University of California at Davis, and Michael McCullough, at the University of Miami, are foremost researchers in field of gratitude. What they have learned so far is that gratitude is good for you, really good for you.

In an experimental comparison, people who kept gratitude journals on a weekly basis exercised more regularly, reported fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic about the upcoming week compared to those who recorded hassles or neutral life events (Emmons & McCullough, 2003). It doesn’t end there.

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect’s name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn’t matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.