Before we can even consider where dreams come form or what causes them you must first understand the steps and stages to sleep. In order for a person to dream they must be in a period of rest which they lose awareness of their surroundings, that which is sleep. Once a person has fallen asleep, they will enter into the first of five stages of sleep. Stages one through four are usually termed as non-REM (rapid eye movement) sleep with stages three and four also being referred to as delta sleep, due to evidence of low frequency brain waves. It is said that non-REM sleep makes up about 80% of sleep and REM sleep makes up the remaining 20%. Stage one lasts around seven minutes. This

Graves, Ginny. What your dreams are trying to tell you. Glamour Aug. 1998 v96, n8, p190-191, 236

Llinas, R. & Pare, D. Of Dreaming and Wakefulness. Neuroscience. New York: Harper 1991.

Scientists do not believe in the interpretation of dreams because they feel dreams are a biological process of the brain to keep it active. They think that numerous sections of the brain aid in dreaming, and have concluded that it is a bottom up process, which is triggered by a region called the pontine brain stem, or pons. These pons, referred to as FTG's, or gigantocellular field of the tegmentum, begin to aid in the dreaming process when the brain goes into REM sleep (Llinas and Pare 28). Some neurological research indicates that large brain cells in the primitive brain stem spontaneously fire about every 90 minutes, sending random stimuli to the cortical areas of the brain. As a consequence, memory, sensory, muscle-control, and cognitive areas of the brain are randomly stimulated, resulting I the higher cortical brain attempting to make sense of it. This is what gives rise to a dream in a scientist's perspective.

Segell, Michael. Dreams: His and Hers. Esquire Feb. 1996 v125, n2 p42

A significant controversy that arises is the question of where dreams have intentional or personal meaning. This debate is between scientists and psychologists, especially psychoanalysts.

Von Keisler, K. Cognition in Dreaming. Los Angeles: J.P.Tarcher 1985

Dreams perform emotional homework that helps us master life's lessons (Graves 190). The mind will work sub-consciously on the small things in life that are often missed because of the larger problems. Many times your mind will put information together that was gathered over either a long or short period of time. For instance, of two pieces of information were obtained, the mind would sub-consciously put them together while in a dream state. While both men and women have the ability to do this, women have and easier time remembering dreams (Graves 190). This could be either because of the content of the dreams or because men do not worry as much about them as women are known to do. The mind also in a dream state can process certain outside stimuli. We close our most important sensory channels, our eyes, and try to protect the other senses from all stimuli or from any modification of the stimuli acting on them (Freud 56). When we are asleep the body tries to close out all of the stimuli that would affect or influence our dreams. The body can do this pretty well but when a strong enough stimulus is encountered when we are asleep, we tend to wake up. An example of this would be when we are sleeping and there is a storm. We don't hear the rain pounding against the window but we will wake up as soon as the thunder strikes. This, however, doesn't always work. I'm sure we can all remember a time when we are dreaming, and in the distance we hear someone screaming out name, only to wake up later on and realize it was out mother. This happens becau

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