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Unit 51

Understanding Dreams

We dream for four hours every night, but may just be able to remember one dream every few days. It is every person's secret life -- and one we typically want to know more about. We want to tap into those nighttime fantasies that have us flying, saving the world and dating movie stars. And we'd like to both learn from and escape our nightmare -- being chased by wild animals, falling off a cliff or sitting down to an exam we never studied for.

Dream researchers find that pain is rarely experienced in dreams. And we do dream in color. But because it's so hard to remember dreams most people forget that fact. 70 to 80 percent of a dream's content comes from the previous day, though the elderly often dream of events from their teens and twenties. Women dream of males and females, and their dreams are often focused on relationships. Men's dreams focus more on males, success and failure.

Today's dream experts agree with Sigmund Freud, who believed that dreams were the subconscious way of communicating with us and that getting to know our dreams was a way to learn about ourselves. For instance, having nightmares means you are psychologically disturbed, suffering from stress, anxiety or depression. Nightmares can be stopped. One way to do this is by dealing with the problem. Confronting a bully at word could stop the dreams of them breaking into your house.

Another way is to write dreams down, changing any detail that doesn't feel right. That could mean making the monster run away, or simply changing the color of the walls. Doing this helps get the fear out of nightmares, and they disappear.

While many dreams are dark, they do serve a purpose -- most importantly, perhaps, helping us to solve problems and develop insight. Jennifer, a 34-year-old journalist, did just that when she was considering going abroad to work. One night she dreamed she was a fashion reporter in New York, where she met supermodels and artists. The dreams made her feel more confident about taking risks. A few months later she quit her job and went to Cuba for three months to study Spanish.

Dreams can help us get used to new people in our lives -- mothers-to-be, for instance, dream about how their baby might look -- and get over those we have lost. For years after a friend died as a teen, Jane, a 38-year-old stay-at-home mother dreamed of him. "I'd run into him and he'd tell me it was all a big mistake, that he wasn't really dead," she recalls. She'd wake up feeling depressed. Such dreams may be part of the mourning process and help us get used to the idea that someone is gone.