“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters”. -Henry David Thoreau

Dreams have fascinated philosophers for thousands of years. You have often found yourself puzzling over mysterious content of a dream. Firstly let’s start by answering a basic question- What is a dream? A dream can include any of the images, thoughts and emotions that are experienced during sleep. Dreams can be filled with joyful emotions or frightening imagery, focused and understandable or unclear and confusing.

Why do we dream? What purpose do dreams serve? While many theories have been proposed, no single consensus has emerged. Ernest Hoffman, suggests that, a possible (though certainly not proven) function of a dream to be weaving new material into the memory system in a way that both reduces emotional arousal and is adaptive in helping us cope with further trauma or stressful events.

Psychoanalytic theory of dreams:
Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams suggested that dreams were representation of unconscious desires, thoughts and motivations. Dreams allows us to be what we cannot be, and say what we cannot say in our daily life.
According to Freud’s psychoanalytic view of personality, people are driven by aggressive and sexual instincts that are repressed from conscious awareness. While these thoughts are not consciously expressed. He suggests that they find their way into our awareness via dreams.

In his famous book ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ Freud wrote that dreams are disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes. He also describes two different components of dreams:
Manifest content and latent content. Manifest is made up of actual image, thoughts and content contained within the dream, while the latent content represent the hidden psychological meaning of the dream.

Activation- Synthesis Model of dreaming:

According to this theory, circuits in the brain become