I have really weird dreams lately, while my roommate doesn't have any. My friend said she remembers only nightmares. Sometimes they're just some visions, images, but occasionally I can see it like a whole story. Some people says our dreams are just representations of our reality, ordered while our brain tries to relax. Others think that we can have prophetic dreams or so-called lucid dreams.
Scientists claimed that our dreams don't have any meaning, they're just random thoughts which we can see in REM stage, when our sleep is shallow and our brain waves are similar to a waking state. In fact, when our dream seems to be an hour long, in fact it lasts about 20-30 seconds! During one night we can have about 5 REM stages, which means we can have up to 5 different dreams, but usually we remember only the last one.
Lucid Dream (LD) is a dream in which we're aware that we're actually dreaming. Sometimes this state is comparable to Out of Body Experience (OOBE), in which we have an impression that our soul leaves our body. Anyway, in both states we can control the action of our dream. At the beginning it's important to notice signs which can show us we're in a dream, ex. if we look at the watch and after a while look again, the hour will be totally different. A good hint can be also reading - if you know what's written but you can't read the text word by word, you're probably in a dream. There are plenty of exercises for lucid dreamers, like writing down your dreams and trying to remember as much as possible, waking up in a specific sleep stage and waking your mind without waking the body, etc. I personally had a few LD, but I couldn't change anything, I could only watch knowing this isn't reality.
Interesting vision of LD had Christopher Nolan, the director of famous film Inception, in which characters have several dreams in other dreams, could dream someone else's dream or even change one's way of thinking by implanting an idea into one's mind during the sleep, which is the definition of inception itself.
An idea of profetic dreams is also interesting, if we believe in power of our intuition. Fortune-tellers say, that this images produced by our brain aren't accidentals. Using a book of dream interpretations we can see the past, the present and the future just like using the Tarot or crystal ball.
There are so many explanations of our dreams, but even science isn't sure why we're actually dreaming. Maybe one day we'll figure it out, but for now it remains a mystery.
