In a sense it is as if we dream in order to let our brain rest, orwe dream to forget? (Crick and Mitchison, 1983). Because we take in so much over such a short period of time, there has to be a period where the conscious can relax. Without thatrest period? our body and mind would go into overload. When Crick and Mitchison, dream researchers, formed the hypothesiswe dream to forget,? they based it on experience and observations. They observed that old memories quickly add up and in order to get rid of them the brain dreams. Imagine a day including any of the following such as activities, classes, a hectic work schedule or an important exam. Not only would one's body be drained, but also the mind would be overworked. There is no physical way to remove that kind of tension from the mind except for going to bed and dreaming.
Dreaming is something that consists more of imagination other than things such as perception. For example Foulkes (1985) denies that dreaming is in any form related to perception, but that it is asymbolic act? more like thinking. That is to say dreaming is symbolic to thinking, not that it has any connections to one's world when they are conscious. Many people wake up from dreams disoriented and wondering what in the world just happened. Sometimes there are strange animals roaming around or something physically impossible happens. That is the work of one's imagination. Strange things in dreams do not have a meaning because the imagination is putting them there as a way of release.
Even though dreams are meaningless, there are many people who try to interpret them. In this they create significance by making signs out of actually meaningless symbols. A dream is something that no one fully understands. When someone gets their dream analyzed by a therapist, it could take over an hour. In that time period the two pull apart the dream and assign meanings to things. A major problem with this is that there is not a set of defined meanings, so different therapists can define the same dream in a number of different ways.
