Let us begin by saying what does not cause our dreams. Our drems do not come form "another world. "They are not messages form some out side source. They are not a look into the future, nor do they prophesy anything.
All our dreams have somthing to do with our emotion, fears, longings, wishes, needs, memories. But something on the "outside" may influence what we dream. If a person is hungry, or tired, or cold, his dreams may include this feeling. If the covers have slipped off your bed, you may dream you are on an iceberg. The material for the dream you have tonight is likely to come form the experiences you will have today.
So the "content" of your dream comes form something that affects you while you are sleeping (you are cold, a noise, a discomfort, ect.) and it may also use your past experiences and the urges and interests you have now. This is why very young children are likely to dream of wizards and fairies, older children of school exams, hungry people of food, homesick soldiers of their families, and prisoners of freedom.
To show you how what is happening while you are asleep and your wishes or needs can all be combined in a dream, here is the story of an experiment. A man was asleep and the back of his hand was rubbed with a piece of absorbent cotton. He dreamed that he was in a hospital and his sweetheart was visiting him, sitting on bed and stroking his hand!
There are people called psychoanalysts who have made a special study of why we dream what we dream and what those dreams mean. Their interetation of dreams is not accepted by everyone, but it offers an interesting approach to the problem. They believe that dreams are expressions of wishes that didn't come true, of frustrated yearnings. In other words, a dream is a way of having your wish fulfilled.
During sleep, according to this theory, our inhibitions are also asleep. We can express or feel what we really want to. So we do this in a dream and thus provide an outlet for our wishes, and they may be wishes we didn't even know we had!
