What are dreams? A dream is the subconscious experience of a sequence of images, sounds, ideas, emotions, or other sensations occurring predominantly during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep when the brain's activity most resembles that seen in wakefulness. REM sleep makes up approximately 20%-25% of sleep. We typically have 4 or 5 periods of REM sleep during the night, with short periods at the beginning of the night and more extended periods as the night progresses. Everyone dreams, everyone dreams 4 or 5 times a night, but you can only remember a dream if you wake up during it or within a couple of minutes of it finishing. If you do not remember your dreams, it is probably that you are just a good sleeper; hence you are not waking up during your dreams. Conversely, if you feel you are always dreaming, it probably means that your sleep is being frequently disturbed for one reason or another. When we are dreaming, the dream is, for all intents and purposes, real to both our mind and body, and so the body can have a physiological response to what occurs in the dream. We have all woken from a dream with our heart pounding, feeling out of breath, sweating and feeling a sense of fear or anxiety. And we have all woken in the morning thinking, 'I cannot possibly go to work today. I have just spent all night fighting dinosaurs, and frankly, I am exhausted'. We are 'living the dream' in the most literal sense. Now it would be a bit embarrassing and potentially dangerous if we were to run around the bedroom four or five times a night enacting our dreams, so to protect us and our bed-partners from harm, when we dream, we lose muscle tone. We are thus unable to act out our dreams. Essentially, we become floppy, except interestingly a part of the male anatomy that frequently does the exact opposite; however, this has nothing to do with the content of the dream. Sexual dreams, in fact, only occur about 10% of the time, although erections occur in approximately 80% of dreams. The actual content of our dreams is limited in certain ways. When we are asleep, we are at our most vulnerable, and therefore we still need to remain vigilant to what is going on in the environment. However, as our dreams are essentially real, experiencing certain sensations in our dreams would compromise our vigilance, which could have serious consequences. For instance, because the sleeper is unable to see or move when asleep, vision and movement do not play a role in providing accurate information about the external world, and therefore they can exist in our dreams without compromising vigilance. This is why the overwhelming majority of our dreams are visual, and we can experience motion, such as the common feeling of flying. However, because we have to rely on our other senses to provide information about what is going on, sensations such as touch, smell or certain sounds that would compromise vigilance by interfering with signals coming from the external environment rarely occur in our dreams. With regards to the emotional content of a dream, anxiety is the most common emotion experienced during dreaming. Most of us have a reoccurring 'stress' dream that is usually about a stressful situation, e.g. relating to events at school, being chased, falling, arriving too late, failing an exam, etc. As in their waking state, it has been found that men generally have more aggressive feelings in their dreams than women, while children's dreams do not contain much aggression until they become teenagers. Most of us have a reoccurring 'stress' dream, that is, usually, about a situation that we would find stressful in real life, e.g. relating to events at school, being chased, falling, arriving too late, failing an exam, etc. It can help deal with stress if you learn to identify your particular recurrent stress dream. The only difference between your dreams and waking reality is that your dreams are internally generated. The content of your dreams can be made up of pretty much anything you know or can imagine. Time is compressed or distorted in your dreams. Your dreams start out as a jumble of images etc. which your brain's tries very hard to make sense of, so however weird and abstract your dreams seem, they are the best interpretation your brain can make of what is going on in your mind. Your dreams only become the stories you think they are when you tell them to your partner/therapist. Dream interpretation Dreams are personal and can be about anything that you know, or you can imagine, thus dream interpretation of whatever type, Freudian, Jungian, 1001 dreams interpreted, is from a scientific point of view absolute nonsense. If your dreams are so important and meaningful, why do you have no memory of the vast majority of dreams that you have and only partial memory of those that you think you do remember? What are these 'forgotten' dreams telling you, and how do you know? Dreams have as much or as little meaning as you would like to invest in them. Beethoven dreamt symphonies; you may never dream symphonies because you are completely non-musical. You don't need people or dream interpretation books to understand what your dreams mean; essentially, that is like asking someone to tell you what you think. Look for the meaning within yourself because your dreams are part of you. We are all different, and if you put two people in front of a Hollywood movie, you will most likely get two views of it; for instance, some people view Star Wars as a deep, meaningful philosophical story, but others see it as a piece of meaningless trash that fills two hours. Your dreams are the same, and you should enjoy them in the same way. So, if you feel your dream is telling you something, then fine, but if you feel that it's just a movie, then it's just a movie. 'If you fall in a dream and hit the ground, you will die' of course you won't, trust me. Lucid dreaming Proponents of lucid dreaming make outlandish claims about their ability to explore new realms of consciousness and creativity while controlling their dreams. In a lucid dream, the dreamer realises that they are simultaneously conscious and dreaming; therefore, they can make decisions concerning, or 'direct', their dream. The art of lucid dreaming is having the conscious awareness that you are dreaming without, by doing this, causing yourself to wake up. Lucid dreaming is a bit like anything; some people find it easy, while others will wake up every time they try to do it. The only real difference between a dream and a lucid dream is that in a lucid dream, events happen in real- time.