How to talk about DREAMS in English

Do you remember your dreams? Do you want to control your dreams? We all dream, but each of us dreams differently. In this lesson, I'll teach you the vocabulary we use to talk about our dreams in English. You'll learn about the different types of dreams that you can have. I'll also tell you what your dreams could mean, and give you tips to have more interesting dreams. You may forget your dreams, but you won't forget this lesson! Test your DREAM vocabulary with the quiz! www.engvid.com/how-to-talk-about-dreams-in-english/ TRANSCRIPT Every night you dream at least, at least 10 dreams a night. Do you remember your dreams? If you do, you're well on your way to having some fantastic times when you close your eyes. Today I'm going to teach you about one of my favourite things in the world ever - dreams and dreaming. Maybe you know the Supertramp song: "Dreamer". I'm not going to sing it for you, but I'm going to teach you about some things I know about dreams. The first one is I want you to ask yourself this question: When you dream, do you dream only in black and white or do you dream in colour? It's interesting because everyone's different. When I dream, I always dream in colour. Some people only dream in black and white, so it's a cool little thing you can ask your friends, ask your family, and see, you'll find out everyone's different. Some people only dream in colour; some people only dream in black and white. I do not know the psychology behind it. I think it's interesting, but I don't know why. The second question that I have for you is: When you dream, are you yourself? This means first-person. So, are you...? Are you doing the action? Or are you watching or seeing yourself do the action? Some people are both, and can do both; it can switch. For me, I am always myself doing the action. Some people, it's like they're watching a movie, and they are the star in the movie. And other people, like I said, can switch and do both. At one point of the dream they can be a main character, and the other point or other dream, they can watch themselves. How about you? Tell me your answers in the comments. Tell me. Do you dream in black and white, or colour? And are you yourself in the dream or do you see or watch yourself in a dream? We'll do a little survey and find out from answers all around the world. What happens when you dream? Let's go into some terminology, some vocabulary, if you will, about dreams. Commonly... We don't really have a word for them because we don't call them "night dreams", but we do have what are called "daydreams". "Daydreams" are what you maybe do at work when you're supposed to be working or at school when you're supposed to be learning, or just at the end of the day on the bus. Daydreams are basically like you are physically there, but your brain is imagining different things. This is one of my hobbies, daydreaming. I remember when I was young-I'm so old now-I would just sit in my room for hours and daydream about everything and anything. It was fantastic. My imagination, massive. So daydreams happen during the daytime, yeah? And "night dreams", we don't actually call them "night dreams", we just call them "dreams". Are you a dreamer? "A dreamer" is someone who dreams, daydreams all the time. They don't really get a lot done. But I'm a dreamer. You got to have dreams, right? Let's go through a couple of kinds of types of dreams. The first one is "lucid". So "lucid dreams" mean you realize in the dream that you are actually dreaming. Now, this, ladies and gentlemen, can be really cool because you might wake up during the dream, and you go: "Hey, I'm dreaming right now." If you can do this, if you can realize you're having a lucid dream, you can then begin to control your dreams. This is one thing that I experimented with when I was younger is that I would realize that I was dreaming, and I would change my dream and make it more into a fantasy. A fantastic fantasy of feathers and fudgesicles. This is a really terrible kind of dream, it's called a "nightmare". Nightmares are also known as "bad dreams". Usually when we're children, we're sleeping, we might [screams] wake up, screaming or crying. Maybe we have dreams about monsters. This would be a nightmare. Bad dreams or nightmares cause anxiety, so something bad is happening to you in the dream, you might dream of death, somebody's dead. Maybe you watched a zombie movie, and in your dream, you're being chased by zombies. It's on a subconscious level, so things that we might have done in the day or talked about or seen can come back in our dream. They can come back in a bad way, and become a nightmare. You might wake up screaming, or crying, or something bad has happened in your dream world.