Understanding Dreams

The science, history and psychology of dreaming.

• Types of Dreams: Nightmares, Lucid Dreams, Recurring Dreams and More

  The main kinds of dreams Not all dreams ask for the same kind of attention. Ordinary dreams recycle the day's leftovers and rarely need interpretation. Nightm

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• How to Remember Your Dreams

  Why dreams evaporate Dream memory is fragile by design: the brain regions that stamp experiences into long-term memory run at low power during REM sleep. Most

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• The Science of Sleep and Dreams

  The architecture of a night Sleep moves in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, each descending through light and deep sleep and surfacing into REM — the stage of ra

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• A Short History of Dream Interpretation in the East

  Dreams as messages between worlds In East Asia, dreams were long read as traffic between the human and the more-than-human: ancestors visiting, spirits advisi

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• A Short History of Dream Interpretation in the West and Islam

  From temples to dream books The ancient Mediterranean took dreams seriously as divine mail: Egyptians and Greeks slept in temples hoping for healing dreams, a

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• Freud, Jung and the Psychology of Dreams

  Freud: the dream as disguised wish For Freud, dreams were "the royal road to the unconscious." He distinguished the dream you remember (manifest content) from

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• A Healthy Attitude Toward Dream Interpretation

  What dream interpretation can and cannot do Let us be direct: there is no scientific evidence that dreams predict the future. What dreams demonstrably do is r

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• Frequently Asked Questions About Dreams

  Does everyone dream? Yes. Nearly everyone dreams several times a night during REM sleep; people who say they never dream almost always mean they never remembe

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