Dream Functions Dreaming is a common phenomenon.

Dream Functions
   Do you often dream? What do you usually see in your dreams? Can you always remember your dreams next morning? From the variety of responses which we could hear to the question ’What did you dream about last night?’ we begin to get an idea of the range of the activity. Research has shown that everyone in normal health spends part of the night dreaming. Remembering the dreams is, of course, a different matter. And just as there are many different types of dream, so, we may suppose, do dreams have a variety of functions? Let us examine just five of many here.
   The first is that of the experience-monitoring dream. In this, the mind reviews past experience the previous day’s or some event in the more distant past—as a way of learning the lesson of that experience. Often the dream has a consequence different from what actually happened, representing a more, or less, desirable course of action or outcome than the real event. After an unsuccessful interview for a job, I dreamed that I was in the same room, before the same people, but speaking this time calmly and persuasively. The conclusion to be drawn from the experience was underlined by the dream, that I should not become nervous and flustered in that particular situation.
   If that dream had occurred before my interview, it would have been of the creative type. One important function of the dream is to help to solve problems by suggesting answers, or predicting difficulties and indicating a way round them. Another creative type of dream is one in which the imagination operates in an unusually powerful and productive manner. Large parts of ’Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ came to the author Robert Louis Stevenson in dreams.
   The dream function to which Freud and his followers attached greatest importance was that of wish fulfillment. According to the great Viennese psychiatrist, in our dreams we satisfy desires which our circumstances, personal inhibitions, or the rules of the society in which we live, deny us the gratification, or even the conscious knowledge. It is my opinion that wish-fulfillment operates at several levels, of which the simplest require neither a complex nor symbolic explanation.
   The fourth dream function is that which alerts us to some external reality, usually by some sensory stimulus; the dream of being at or in a fire from which we awake to find a cigarette smoldering in a bedside ashtray. In this way the senses send messages to the ’sleeping’ mind, warning us of the need to awake in order to take some form of action.
   Finally, the most controversial, the predictive function. Whether or not we believe in the possibility of events being predicted in dreams, the fact is that throughout the ages men have done so. Perhaps the most famous example, celebrated in Christianity and Islam alike, not to mention Judaism, is that of Joseph’s interpretation of the dream of the Pharaoh of Egypt. When the ruler dreamed of seven fat cattle being eaten by seven thin, Joseph predicted that there would be seven years of plenty in the land, followed by seven years of famine, and that is what came to pass.
   What other dream functions can you think of? Whatever your answer, it is true that dreams are part of our life.