There is perhaps no more mystical and unexplored state of the human body than a dream. It is he who has a huge impact on the activity and concentration of people, their ability to concentrate and perceive new information, perform important tasks, etc. In this regard, in the Russian tradition, the aspect of sleep is given great importance, embodied in aphorisms, proverbs and other small oral genres.
Sleep as part of a healthy lifestyle
Without the proper amount of sleep, a person can not only work at full strength, concentrating as much as possible on the performance of his official and domestic duties, but also feels bad, is in a state of some apathy. To avoid such consequences of lack of sleep, you need to stay awake and relax in a ratio of 2: 1. According to scientists, the minimum norm of sleep for an adult per day is 7 hours. For a child, this indicator is usually 1-2 hours more.
At the same time, the stages of sleep are distinguished, as well as the time of its course. In this regard, proverbs about the rules of healthy sleep appeared in the folk tradition. They regulate the time when a person goes to bed and when he gets up. So, it is believed that sleep until 12 at night is the most useful for the restoration of all body systems. The time before dawn is the most energy-intensive, so it is of the least importance.
Proverbs about healthy sleep especially emphasize that a person should wake up at sunrise, because, firstly, it is useful, and secondly, it corresponds to the Christian worldview of Russian people who are confident that they must work in the morning.
Dream in Russian culture
This mystical state plays a very important role in the culture of every nation, including Russian. It is not without reason that folklore pays such great importance to statements related to sleep. Since ancient times, people believe that dreams are not just random pictures that come at night, but the possibility of knowing and changing your future, predicting the future.
Proverbs about the rules of healthy sleep often reflected the possibility of adjusting human life. For example, they described a sequence of actions, following which a young girl would be able to see her fiance, and then recognize him in reality.
No wonder such a great scientist as V. Dahl included folk dream books in his work, which are an integral part of Russian culture.
Russian sayings about a dream
The inhabitants of Russia could not get around the topic of sleep and dreams in their folklore. That is why in collections of Russian sayings one can find such sayings as “food - food of the body, sleep - food of vivacity”, “you won’t even dream about it in a dream,” etc. The first proverb from these narrates about the essence of sleep and compares it with other necessary for life, food is a resource. The second is a saying, which is usually used in a negative sense, when a person saw something bad - something that terrified him.
Another proverb about the beneficial effects of night rest on the body - "get enough sleep - get younger." It implies that during sleep there are restoration processes of the nervous and other systems of the human body.
Motives of sleep in the works of Russian writers
In domestic literature, authors often resort to the sleep motive as an opportunity to give an additional characterization of the characters of the work. Perhaps one of the most famous examples of the use of this technique is an entire chapter from the novel Oblomov, which is called Oblomov’s Dream. It tells about the hero’s childhood, places that he sometimes walked about, his mother, who takes excessive care of him, which prevented him from developing mental abilities to become a full member of society.
Some proverbs about the rules of healthy sleep imply that it is he who is able to prolong a person’s life, that is, to distance him from death. The motive of contrasting sleep and death as two similar and at the same time opposing forces in his poem "Gemini" uses F. Tyutchev.
Zhukovsky’s ballad “Svetlana” is widely known, in which the composition is built precisely around the dream of the lyrical heroine. After fortunetelling, the girl has a nightmare in which she sees her dead groom. But in reality, everything is fine - the young man comes to her, they are happy.
Aphorisms and sayings about sleep
Similar to Tyutchev’s “Gemini”, the idea is embodied in the statement of Plutarch, who also emphasizes the similarity of the nature of death and sleep: “Sleep is a small mystery of death, sleep is the first initiation into death.” The sage speaks of the borderline state of a person when the soul is far beyond the body, covering huge distances in a second.
Aphorisms about sleep are an integral part of the ancient Greek culture, since in those days the cult of a healthy body was promoted, which is impossible without rest.
Philosophers of Modern and Contemporary times also do not bypass this topic, treating it as a change in state, a temporary disconnection from reality, a kind of “new” life. "I like to sleep. My life tends to fall apart when I wake up, ”- this is what E. Hemingway once said about a dream. Similar aphorisms about sleep illustrate the thesis advanced above.
Interpretation of dreams in Russia
An extremely important place in Russian culture is the interpretation and interpretation of dreams as states when the future is revealed to a person. Researchers on this topic often refer to proverbs about healthy sleep, on which you can catch the symbolism of the future.
So, the interpretation can be divided into thematic categories depending on what a person saw at night. The first group is natural phenomena. This includes a description of the elements, stones, trees, rivers, droughts, thunderstorms, snowfalls and others. For example, ice in a dream means some kind of trouble that a person will soon have. Sand can be interpreted in different ways. It can symbolize wealth, because in texture and color it resembles gold in nature. On the other hand, sand can dream of as a harbinger of meeting with an old friend.
Proverbs about the rules of healthy sleep can sometimes be based on symbols that are not clear to the average person. The same thing happens with the interpretation of dreams. So, one of the concepts in the Light and Color category - blue color - means big trouble, fire - joy, lackey brings failure, etc.
Puzzles for children about a dream
Riddles about sleep in Russian culture, as a rule, are naive and obvious, since the state described in them is intuitively clear to them. But there are also those who need to be pondered over in order to find the correct guess: "Both the army and the governor have thrown everyone down." In this case, the difficulty lies in the fact that many answers are suitable. There is another riddle that describes a dream, like what a person sees when he closes his eyes.