Why Do We Dream

In researching this subject, I have learned that everyone has dreams, and our dreams are vital to our mental health. I believe that we dream because we have so much in or on our mind at one time that we have to release some of it somehow; therefore, we dream.

All over the world, for many years now, pyschologists, scientists, and many others have had different dream theories. For example, in the early 1900's, a very famous dream theorist named Sigmund Freud, (also the founder of psychoanalysis) said that the function or purpose of dreams was to preserve sleep. That theory however, didn't last long, simply by the fact that dreams happen at least 4 or 5 times a night in an active stage called REM sleep. Another famous dream theorist, Carl Jung, who was also an earlier follower of Freud, had a very different theory. He claimed that the function of dreams was to make up for the parts of the total personality that is not developed in waking life. His theory too was short lived though, our dream content is continuous with our waking thoughts and our behavior. Some dream theorists even believe that our dreams can help us solve problems that we can't solve while we are awake; but there is very little if any support on this view. I believe that dreams probably have no purpose, but I do believe that they have meaning. I also believe that dreams do reveal what is in our minds.

Our dreams sometimes shift from one thing to another very fastly. I believe that is because we have so many different thoughts, feelings, visions, and emotions in our brain. Most of these we are not even aware of. This is why some of our dreams seem to be so weird. Some dreams have symbolic meaning. Our dream symbols come in two different ways. One is the everyday symbol pertaining to who we are. The second symbolic value is often symbolized by mythological persons or themes. When these symbols are properly understood, dreams can assist in emotional healing.