Dreams occur to everyone, every night but very little do we use the information our subconscious dreams are trying to tell us . Although we cannot control our dreams, they are stories that our mind creates while we are asleep and can often make us feel scared or happy. Dreams occur anytime during sleep but our most vivid dreams are experienced during deep sleep in the rapid eye movement phase (“Facts about Dreams”). Although researchers are still unclear as to why we sleep, studies have shown that dreaming is beneficial to our health. In a study where researches woke the subjects just before entering the rapid eye movement stage and prohibiting their ability to dream, the subjects experienced anxiety, depression, lack of coordination and many other effects.  Although everyone experiences dreams at night, not everyone remembers their dreams or finds meaning in them. Recent studies have shown that our dreams do hold valuable information that correlates to our waking life, but there are still many scientists who disagree with this statement and still much more research to be done. If our dreams really do tell us about our inner selves and our lives, we are missing a large portion of ourselves. Dreams uncover our deepest thoughts and emotions and tell us information about ourselves and our lives that we are not even aware of. Dreams are an important part of our lives that are often overlooked, however they contain relevant information about an individual that they may be unware of and help to process whatever emotions and challenges they might face in daily life.

 Although everyone dreams at night, dreams are rarely talked about or even remembered making them a fascinating topic to discuss but also controversial. Even though they are a daily part of everyone’s lives, people are still unaware as to how they are important and what they mean. In a study conducted by Carey Morewedge, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he found that most people “believe their dreams provide meaningful insight into themselves and their world” (Hamilton).  Morewedge and his fellow researchers conducted six different studies and studied nearly 1,100 people from multiple nationalities about the content of their dreams. In his first study, Morewedge and his partner Michael Norton, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, took a survey of 149 college students from the United States, India and South Korea. The survey asked the students to rate different theories about dreams and found that across all three cultures the majority of the students who participated agreed with the theory that their dreams “reveal hidden truths about themselves and their world” (Hamilton).  This survey and its conclusion is important because it shows that most people do believe that their dreams are an important part of their lives that hold valuable information. In the second study conducted, Morewedge asked 182 travelers at a Boston train station about their dreams effecting travel plans and found that people who dreamed about crashing or similarly disturbing events had higher levels of anxiety about traveling. Through this survey he was able to explore how dreams have the ability to effect a person’s waking actions and behavior. In another study conducted by Morewedge he wanted to examine how our dreams are influenced by our waking beliefs and desires. Morewedge asked 270 men and women about their dreams and found that people related a good dream to someone that they liked and a bad dream to a person that they disliked. This study is important to Morewedge’s research because it shows that “people attribute meaning to dreams when it corresponds with preexisting beliefs and desires” (Hamilton). Although the theory has not been proposed and there is still much more research to be done on the matter of our dreams, it is beneficial that most people do believe our dreams are a greatly important part of our lives that do hold information. 

Dreams are a way for an individual to compress their emotions and thoughts of the day. So many emotions, actions, thoughts and concerns occur during just a single day that it is crucial for our mind to take a break at night and dream. Dr. Rosalind Cartwright, a psychologist at Rush Medical Center in Chicago believes that “dreams are connected with adjustment to major life crises” after her research on the dreams of divorced women (Goleman). Dr. Cartwirght investigated and compared the dreams of women who were divorced, women who were divorced and depressed and women who were happily married. Through her research she found that the depressed women had unusual REM sleep with “earlier onset, longer duration and more intensely visual first REM period of the night” (Goleman). This meaning that they started to dream earlier and their dreams were more vivid and lasted longer. The divorced and depressed women rarely acted as a wife or dealt with marital issues in their dreams while in contrast, the dreams of divorced but not depressed women had reoccurring dreams of themselves in the role of a former or present wife. In conclusion, Dr. Cartwright found that the divorced women who were not suffering from depression had the most anxious dreams and found that their levels of anxiety increased as their dreams and night’s sleep continued. Her results from this experiment support her claim that dreams are a way for dreamers “to deal with upsetting psychological issues” (Goleman). Dr. Cartwrights findings are important for dream research because her experiment shows a clear relationship between the women’s waking conflicts and how that effects their dreams. 

Dreams help us to process our emotions and thoughts but also talking about them and trying to understand what they mean has been found to be a successful form of learning as well as therapy for struggling teens. Kelly Bulkeley is an inner city school teacher who uses dream discussion in his classroom to learn more about his student’s inner fears and challenges. He uses his own student’s dreams as evidence that our lives do have an impact on our dreams. After Bulkeley got his PhD in Religion and Psychological Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School he decided that he wanted to teach a course on dreams at a small high school. Bulkelys believes that dreams took up too much of our lives to not be discussed in a setting like school, “it seemed really strange that one hears almost nothing about dreams in school. We spend almost a third of our lives sleeping; dreaming is, as we all know, a wondrous aspect of being human…But we don’t talk about dreams in school. What a waste! There is so much we can learn from our dreams” (Bulkeley). He believed and argued to the school board that dreams do serve an “educational, creative, psychological, and social value” (Bulkeley). Through his class on dream discussion Bulkeley began to realize a relationship between what the children were dreaming about and the turmoil they faced on an everyday basis, such as incarceration, heavy police presence, drug use and  teen pregnancy. Not only did he see how the students’ lives affected their dreams but found that talking about dreams was a way to for the troubled students to open up and talk about their issues in a nonjudgmental way. Bulkeley’s research and the experience he shares with his students is important for dream research because it shows how there is a direct relationship between what the students struggle with on a daily basis and how those issues affect their dreams. The information he has gathered is also important because it demonstrates how dream discussion can be a successful form of therapy. Through hearing and discussing the dreams of his students Bulkeley believes that dreams not only hold our true feelings and challenges that we may face but discussing what occurs in our dreams also has a large impact on our well-being.  

In another article similar to Bulkeleys book, Brittany Wong uses examples from the dreams of couples to explain how our dreams can affect our waking lives. Brittany Wong highlights in her article a study which was published in May of 2013 in the journal of Social, Psychological, and Personality Science which showed “that our dreams have real consequences in our daytime interactions with our partners in the days that follow” (Wong).  The study at the University of Maryland looked at the dream journals of 61 couples and their relationship activity in the days following their dreams. After examining their dreams, researchers found that after a partner experienced “dreams about infidelity, jealousy, or other ‘bad’ relationship behavior were associated with greater relationship conflict and reduced intimacy in subsequent days” (Wong). Lead author of the study and a psychology lecturer at the University of Maryland claims “A lot of people don’t pay attention to their dreams and are unaware of the impact they have on their state of mind” (Wong). Although this source doesn’t show that what we experience during our waking lives affects our dreams it does show the opposite, that the content of our dreams does affect how we act during our daily life and our feelings towards individuals.  

Throughout history people have been recording the content of their dreams, today many people hold dream journals in which they write down their dreams from the night before and use it as a reference later in life to understand what that dream meant or how it played a role in their life. A video which appeared on CNN in 2007 looks at two different dream analysts and examines how they believe dreams impact our lives. Lauri Loewenberg, a professional dream expert who is a Certified Dream Analysis and has researched over 75,000 dreams, believes that every object an individual dreams about is put there for a reason and is meant to tell them something either about their life or their behavior. Dr. Patricia Garfield, who received her PhD from Temple University and has published more than ten books, claims that dreams are a way for individuals to confront their fears (Sleep).  Dr. Garfield uses her own dream journals which she has kept for more than fifty years as evidence to support her claims. Her journals have taught her about herself and helped her understand her fears and hopes. Both women work as dream experts but also use their own expertise in their own life. Through their work on multiple individuals they have been able to interoperate thousands of dreams and tell people what their dreams are trying to tell them or what information their dreams might be holding back. Their work is important to dream research and the people who have benefited from them because it shows that our dreams do hold important meaning that can tell us about ourselves.

 William Domhoff, a professor at the University of California and the author of the book Finding Meaning in Dreams: A Quantitative Approach, provides a mathematical approach to how meaning can be found in our dreams. The content of his book includes how there is a similarity in the dreams of specific groups of people, how dreams have stayed the same over time and lastly shows a “direct continuity between dream concerns and waking concerns” (Domhoff). His book also introduces the Hall/Van de Castle coding system which was constructed through the study of thousands of dreams accounts of college students during the 1940s and 50s. The Hall/ Van De Castle coding system, is unique compared to other methods of dream analysis because it relies completely on the individual dream reports to determine if there is meaning in dreams. The coding system used throughout his book “makes comparisons of dream reports in three different ways to search for dream meaning” (Domhoff). It first compares new dream reports with information about American college students and other groups of people. Secondly it compares one dream to other dreams in the same series and lastly it compares reports of specific types of dreams collected by multiple people or dreams that are common such as flying or falling. The Hall/Van de Castle coding system takes into consideration the different elements that appear in dreams such as the characters, social interactions, setting and activities that engage the dreamer. The coding system also includes coding categories for emotions, successes and failures, and good and bad fortunes. By using the Hall/ Van de Castle coding system over 10,000 dream reports have concluded similarities between gender and cultural boundaries. Through analyzing the dream diaries of varied individuals and using the Hall/ Van de Castle coding system, Domhoff has concluded “that there are large individual differences in dream content as well as a high degree of consistency in what a person dreams about over the space od several months or years…there are also striking continuities between dream content and waking life, making possible accurate predictions about the concerns and interests of the dreamers” (Domhoff). Domhoff’s book and its use of the Hall/ Van de Castle coding system are important for dream research because it shows how the meaning of dreams can be determined through a serious of reliable coding. 

Although many scientists believe that our dreams and lives do have a valuable relationship there are still scientists today that disagree and even some who believe dreaming has no ultimate function. Doctor Michael J. Breus, a clinical psychologist and a diplomate of the American Board of Sleep Medicine calls attention to the fact that there is still a significant amount of research to be done and there is yet to be a proven understanding of why we dream and how they affect our life. Because there is no exact answer as to why people dream, scientists have come up with multiple theories. Some of the theories Brues presents in his article is that dreams are a “protective act by the brain to prepare itself to face threats, dangers and challenges” or “an extension of waking consciousness, reflecting the experiences of waking life” (Brues).  Although Brues points out that the function of dreams in unknown and it will be some time before there is an answer, he goes on further in the article to show how “dreams are a creative landscape for the mind”, specifically looking at the dreams of artists (Breus).  In one of the studies examined by Brues, the dreams of a musician not only releveled that they frequently have reoccurring dreams about music but that “nearly half of the music they recalled from their dreams was unfamiliar and novel to them” (Brues).  The information found in the study helps to conclude the idea that the composition of music is possible even while dreaming. Throughout his article Brues provides both supporting and disagreeing evidence that dreams have meaning but ultimately concludes his article by agreeing that “dreams provide us with insight about what’s preoccupying us, troubling us, engaging our thoughts and emotions. Often heling, often mysterious, always fascinating, dreams can both shape us and show us who we are” (Breus).  Bruse’s argument points out important information that brings a new argument on dreams and their relationship with our lives. There is still information and research to be done until conclsuions can be drawn about dreams, however there are many studies such as the one presented in Bruse’s article that support the relationship between an individual’s waking life and their dreams. 

Dream research, although it is a controversial and sometimes difficult topic to understand, it is something that effects everyone and should be further explored. Everyone dreams four to six times a night but most people, including myself don’t take the time to comprehend what they mean and how they might help to further understand complicated emotions or situations that surround us. Dreams do have a purpose in our life and take up a large part of our time, it is important for us to understand what they mean and what they are trying to say. Overall dreams need to become a larger part of our discussed life, instead of waking up and forgetting them they should become a topic of discussion to help benefit dream research as well as discover more about ourselves and our subconscious mind at work. 
