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On average, we spend about one third of our lives sleeping. Events in dreams may seem disjointed, and the ordinary logic of cause and effect may disolve. Dream characters may flout the laws of physics or behave in ways that seem wildly out of character. Indeed, when the mind is freed of its normal shackles, dreamers can radically reshape themselves and everything around.
Fantastical as the dreamscape may seem, however, it is not unfamiliar territory. Dreams has fascinated people of all cultures from the earliest times. About 5,000 years ago, in what is now Iraq, high priests of the Mesopotamian civilization of Sumer considered dreams to be direct instructions from heaven to the kings. The Egyptians, a thousand years later, regarded dreams as a source of supernatural wisdom and kept inventories, which have since been recovered by archaeologists, of the most important types of dreams and what they might predict. As told in the Old Testament\'s Book of Genesis, Joseph interpreted the Egyptian pharaoh`s dreams as visions of a coming famine. Tibetan Buddhist lamas even today believes that dreams can reveal the shape of life to come after reincarnation.
For the most part, people seeking to understand the dream world, no longer look to the supernatural for answers. Over the past century researchers have focused instead on two earthly sources of information: analysis of the human self (psychology), and physical probing of the body and brain (physiology). A great deal of modern research falls in the second category and rests on data from experiments conducted on laboratory animals.
(By the way, there was an expriment that showed, that rats were not able to live if their REM sleep periods would be banned for more than 2 weeks )
But although these scientific explorations have shown valuable light on what physically happens to the brain when it enters the dream state, they have not solved the essential mystery of why we dream. In many ways, they only deepened it.
In 1900, Sigmund Freud ushered in the modern age of dream research in his monumentally original book \"The Interpretation of Dreams\". According to Freud, dreams are disguised thoughts from the unconscious mind. He developed an elaborate theory of dreaming and how the mind works while asleep. Carl Jung, and early student of Freud, broke with his teacher in insisting that the surface content of dreams is the meaning and that deep symbolic interpretation has little importance.
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