hat occur during sleep” (Collier’s, 1984). Dreams are usually very vivid in color and imagery. They are said to reveal to the dreamer different wishes, concerns, and worries that he or she has. Dreams may reflect every part of who the dreamer is. The content of dreams depends on “how old the dreamer is and how educated the he or she is” (Collier’s, 1984). We have no control over that which we dream about, but we do know that they are influenced by situations in our lives. An example of how a dream can be influenced by our lives is as follows. I had a dream that I was surfing in Hawaii a couple of nights after I returned from Honolulu in 1990. My dream about surfing stemmed from when we were there, we went to the Pipeline, on the north shore of Oahu. The dream itself was weird. I was on my board and I fell off. The weird part was that when I was in the water I started sinking, I decided to try to swim to the surface. I figured that the water was much deeper than I thought, so I kept swimming. I started to run out of breath and I began to panic. I woke up from the dream and found that my sheet was in my mouth blocking my intake of air. This shows how physiological needs can manifest themselves in our dreams. An individual’s unconscious mind combines bits and pieces of information and places them together. Dreams are almost always visual. “Forty to fifty percent of dreams have some form of communication present in them and a very small percentage of dreams give the dreamer the ability to use his or her five senses”(Encarta). Dreams allow one to take a closer look into their mind in a quest for self-discovery. In ancient Greece dreams were believed to be messages from the gods. Hippocrates and Aristotle believed that dreams contained physiological information that may be cause of future illnesses. Dreams can be used to solve a number of different types of problems. In The Interpretation of Dre...
