with the normal amount of traffic but we would just stop not knowing where to go: Straight, left, right, or back? This happened over and over again. Of course when I woke up, I realized the significance of this particular dream. In real life we were lost on our way home and my friends put their trust in me so we wouldn't get lost in the first place, but, unfortunately, we did get sidetracked a little. So, by having a crossroads in my dream and not knowing where to go was my unconscious telling me what it felt like to be on a trip where trust was put on you, and you failed. Of course we got home safe and sound, though two hours late.

Sigmund Freud also experienced unusually vivid dreams ever since his own boyhood. He had always had a keen, almost superstitious interest in dreams and dreaming. He wrote to Martha, his wife, about one instance when he

Again, Freud's main theory of the dream was that it represented "the disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish", though the material that broke through undisguised he called dreams as well. Sexual symbols were also used in his interpretation of dreams and were only a few of the many postulated by Freud and his followers in the succeeding years; Basically anything cylindrical in a dream was a male or "phallic symbol", and anything hollow was a female symbol.

Despite this, there is no proven fact on why we dream, which is why there are so many theories on the topic. Freud's theory states that dreams carry our hidden desires. There is also Jung's theory that dreams carry meaning, although not always of desire, and that these dreams can be interpreted by the dreamer. After these theories, others continued such as the Cayce theory in which dreams are our bodies' means of building up of the mental, spiritual and physical well-being. Finally came the argument between Evans' theory and the Crick and Mitchinson theory. Evans states that dreaming is our bodies way of storing the vast array of information gained during the day, whereas Crick and Mitchinson say that this information is being dumped rather than stored.

Other theorists such as Rosalind Cartwright in 1977 proposed that dreams provide an opportunity to work through everyday problems. This is known as her cognitive "Problem-Solving View", in which there is considerable continuity between waking and sleeping thought. Proponents of this view believe that dreams allow people to engage in creative thinking about problems because dreams are not restrained by logic or realism. (Weiten 127)

pg. 143, 1987 John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York

It's a known fact that REM sleep recurs about every 90 minutes throughout the time spent asleep, in periods that successively grow in duration from an initial length of 10 minutes. Between the ages of 10 and the mid-60s, people spend about a quarter of their time asleep in REM sleep. If this amount is temporarily lowered because of the use of certain drugs or by waking a sleeper in REM sleep, as soon as permitted, the person will recover by naturally increasing his or her amount of time in REM sleep, accompanied of course by an increase in dreaming.

Huffman, Karen; Vernoy, Mark & Judith, "Psychology in Action", 4th edition,

Thornton, E.M., "The Freudian Fallacy: An Alternative View of Freudian Theory",

Some common words found in the essay are:
Interpretation Dreams, It's REM, Freud Cartwright, Sigmund Freud, Id Superego, Crick Mitchinson, , REM Sleep, Robert McCarley, Problem-Solving View, rem sleep, night terrors, theory dreams, vivid dreams, unusually vivid dreams, unusually vivid, theory dreams carry, weiten 127, experience vivid, edition pg, nrem sleep, night terrors occur, dream real life, difficulty remembering,
Approximate Word count = 1930
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)