Translation--2  

1. Of all the components of a good night ' s sleep ， dreams seem to be least within our control ．In dreams ，a window opens into ,a world where logic is suspended and dead people speak. A century ago ， Freud formulated this revolutionary theory that dreams were the disguised shadows of our unconscious desires and fears ；by the late 1970s ，neurologists had switched to thinking of them as just “ mental noise ”一 the random byproducts of the neural 一 repair work that goes on during sleep. Now researchers suspect that dreams are part of the mind ' s emotional thermostat ，regulating moods while the brain is“off-line.”And one leading authority says that these intensely powerful mental events can be not only harnessed but to help us sleep and feel better.“It's your dream ，”says Rosalind Cartwright ， chair of psychology at Chicago ' s Medical Center. “ If you don 't like it ，change it ．”  

2. Illustrated with an entertaining array of examples from both high and low culture ，the trend that Mr. McWhorter documents is unmistakable. But it is less clear ，to take the question of his subtitle ，why we should ，like ，care. As a linguist ，he acknowledges that all varieties of human language ，including nonstandard ones like Black English ， can be powerfully expressive 一 there exists no language or dialect in the world that cannot convey complex ideas. He is not arguing ，as many do ，that we can no longer think straight because we do not talk proper.