What is a dream?
In a time where infotech is highly pronounced it is near to say , that you can see dreams as a databank with personal connections to the universe. They are important to your present life, your future life and also to your past life as well.
What may be going on in a dream you may wonder. Well for one thing your consciousness is far more active during sleep than when it’s awake. The dreaming self is extremely active, and totally conscious, it is as conscious as you are now, may be even more. The dreaming self is able to process far more information than your waking self can. The dreaming self is capable of multi-cognition, means it can be in more than one place at one time, and it can have two or more thoughts at one time.
Dreams have been a part of the human psyche since prehistoric times. They have been said to have different purposes at different times. Early on some saw them as divined messages from omnipotent beings in dreams, later others saw them as a window to the unconscious. Some dismiss them as nothing more than a biochemical reaction. Now what do you think they mean?

Culture and Dreams
One of the oldest records of dreams and their interpretations is a papyrus of 1250 BC (bef. Christ) which records some 200 dreams and their meanings.
Babylonians -saw dreams as messages from supernatural beings
Assyrians -saw dreams as omens, some demanded action, others were seen as "advice"
Egyptians believed that dreams contained messages from good and evil spirits. To recall them and stimulate them, they used many techniques including the use of herbal potions, reciting spells, or sleeping in the temple.
Greeks -dreams could be good or bad. Sometimes a treatment would be worked up to help incubate good dreams. Dreams often told a prophecy. For Aristotle dreams were premonitions of an illness coming from within the body, where the wake body was not aware. The Romans had similar beliefs.
Hebrews -dreams were a vision or prophecy from a god
Hindus -dreams are mostly prophetic, and the timing of the dream will indicate how soon the prophecy will come to pass
Shinto -dreams are sought as visions to help answer questions that are plaguing the waking self. Usually the answers come from ancestral spirits.
Muslims -dreams and astrology are closely related. True dreams come from god, false ones from the devil.
Australian Aborigines –underworld spirits rise and wander in the land of the living, and when they pass through a mortal being via a dream a "greater vision" is acquired..
North American Indians –in dreams hidden wishes of the soul are addressed and fulfilled in dreams. Visions can also be sought after in the hope of answering a question or resolving a conflict.

Dream as regarded in modern times
Sigmund Freud
For him there were two categories of dreams, those generated from within your physical body and mind and those that come from your spirit guides. They have different purposes and it’s necessary to recognize what these differences mean to you and how they interact in your waking and dreaming state.
Dreams that originate from the physical body deal with your physical and psychological well being. These dreams are used to keep body and mind tidy for your general well being.
Other dreams have a mystical and special characteristic, which are for your spiritual development and progress. They produce instant knowledge and information that is beyond your ability to garner through intellectual or logical means.
According to him everybody dreams, even it cannot be recalled. Most dreams occur during deep sleep time, which takes up about 25% of total sleep
One of Freud's main theme's was the amount of activity that goes on in our minds without our awareness. Freud described dreams as the "royal road" to understanding the unconscious. His most famous work was

Anatomy of Dream

In this book first published 1899 he argued that the foundation of all dream content is the fulfillment of wishes, conscious or not. His theory explains that the schism between ego or or the preconscious and id or the unconscious leads to "censorship" of dreams. The unconscious would like to depict the wish fulfilled wholesale, but the preconscious cannot allow it. The wish within a dream is thus disguised, and only an understanding of the structure of the dream-work can explain the dream. Within a dream there are often a multitude of wishes on a variety of levels, conscious wishes for the immediate future to unconscious wishes pertaining to the far past
Freud listed four transformations of wishes to get past the censor as a dream.
Condensation = dream object could stand for several thoughts
Displacement = the dream object's significance is less important than the disguised significance
Representation = a thought is translated to visual images
Symbolisation = an action or a person is replaced by a different symbol

These transformations help to disguise the latent content. For him nightmares represented a clash between the ego (preconscious) and the id (unconscious). The id wishes to see a past wish fulfilled, while the ego cannot allow it. For him most of these anxious dreams are products of infantile, sexual memories.
Wishes are not revealed in dream analysis for the sake of fulfillment, but instead for conscious resolution of the inner conflict.
Freud arrived at his theory of dreams by research, self-analysis, and psychoanalysis of his patients As his theory developed, Freud often used dream interpretation to treat his patients,

Carl Gustav Jung

A Swiss psychiatrist lived from 1875 to 1961, Before deciding to pursue medicine Jung studied biology, zoology, paleontology, and archaeology. In addition he studied philosophy, mythology, early Christian literature and religion .
For a long period he worked together with Freud. After this period was over he started his own movement and began to look for common themes, symbols or ideas that are present in all humankind and for all our dreams. Jung emphasized not only the individual unconscious, but also the collective unconscious.
For him dreams are communications from the unconscious. Most of the time, dreams can be regarded as "compensatory" views to the conscious, expressing aspects of the individual that are suppressed or neglected. This idea of the natural tendency for the conflicting conscious and unconscious to approach a balance, is the basis of Jung's overall theor. Due to the fact that they are often highly symbolic, dreams can be hard to understand and are subject to nuance and misinterpretation

For him there were basically two layers of the unconscious psyche. The first was the personal unconscious, which contains what the individual has acquired in his/her life, but which has been forgotten or repressed. The second layer is the collective unconscious, which contains the memory traces common to all humankind. These experiences form archetypes, which symbolize certain situations in a distinct way. There are many archetypes such as having parents, finding a mate, having children and confronting death. Very complex archetypes are found in all mythological and religious systems. Near the end of his life Jung added another and deepest layer of the unconscious which functions independently of the laws of space, time and causality. This is what gives rise to paranormal phenomena
The collective unconscious is common to all. While we can see and feel it’s effects, science can not study the “unconscious” directly. The only proof of its existence can be found in the complex workings of the human mind and spirit.
The individual conscious mind may have the power to connect us to other levels, or dimensions, of ourselves and eventually to everyone and everything else.
According to C. G. Jung the unconscious is not necessarily smarter, but it holds different information than our conscious mind. It enables us to see things that are at times difficult to understand and admit. For Jung a person that has a healthy personality can realize the opposite tendencies within him/herself and can express each. Dreams serve to compensate for any neglected parts of the personality.

Dream analysis tradition
Today dream analysis is an integral part of psychoanalysis,. that intends to look to the meaning of the dream and the reason why we dreamt it. But there are a lot of questions still open.
Why decreases the amount of dreaming at old age? Why dream mammals born prematurely, such as rats, more than mature animals? Why dream depressed people more? Why may we have evolved to dream and others. We don’t have real answers up to now.

Hall
In 1953, Calvin S. Hall developed a theory of dreams in which dreaming is considered to be a cognitive process. For him a dream was simply a thought or sequence of thoughts that occurred during sleep, and that dream images are visual representations of personal conceptions. For example, if one dreams of being attacked by friends, this may be a manifestation of fear of friendship; a more complicated example, which requires a cultural metaphor, is that a cat within a dream symbolizes a need to use your intuition.

How is it possible to get information when you sleep?
When you are asleep, so is the physical component of your self. The five senses, smelling, tasting, feeling, seeing, and hearing, and your ego, the controlling master, are all temporarily suspended from activity. Sleeping allows the sixth sense, to take over for awhile without much interference. This is when both the physical body and your spiritual essence can perform maintenance simultaneously to help unwrinkle parts of your life. It’s ironic. that this is the state of being that psychics and mediums practice for years to achieve, and everyone enters it every time they fall asleep.

What kind of dreams can we have?
There are several components to each dream category. Dreams from the physical body include dreams concerning Food, Health and Psychological levels. Dreams from the spiritual realm include dreams concerning the future, new information or knowledge and appearance of deceased or spirit guides.

Dreams from the physical body.

Food:
Did you ever notice that when you take a nap after you’ve eaten lunch, you may have some crazy images going through your mind. The same thing happens at night too, because food can trigger some wild dreams. If you enjoy these psychedelic excursions, then take note of what you had to eat before hand and repeat the process. On the other hand, if you’re not interested, then take note of what you ate and make certain to avoid eating the same again. Food is normally a generator of dreams, which is not worth interpreting.

Health
While your body can signal, when something’s wrong or needs your attention, eg not feeling well, dizziness, weakness, etc, dreams can be even a more important way to find out about your health.
Your subconscious knows a lot about you that you don’t, or maybe don’t even care to know. Often it will tell you something about your lifestyle to tip you off about what the real needs are. In dreams it tries to get the point across to you, sometimes politely, at other times drastically.

Psychology
Stressful relations and social situations can cause our mind to get out of order, but our subconscious intervenes to straighten things out. Think of this as something like an automatic pilot in an aircraft in turbulence. When something happens that contradicts our sense of right or wrong, good and bad, it can make us pretty unhappy and affect our outlook on life.
Through our dreams, the subconscious mind tries to provide us with the right dream at the right time, to compensate for the many things that cause our peace of mind to get out of balance.
If we have fears, it tries to feed us those fears little by little in coded form to help us overcome them. If the soft approach is not possible, nightmares can be utilized as well.
If we have unfulfilled desires it may provide us with a substitute to alleviate the sense of lacking.
Some of these dreams are pretty clear and others are embedded in deeply symbolic presentations taken from our own memory bank of experiences. To solve the riddle of our dreams we need to sort out the feelings, meanings, and the memories of what all these symbols mean to us from our own experience.

Dreams arrived from the spiritual world
They are special visits, instructions, lessons and guidance that we receive sometimes. They are interwoven with dreams your body generates. These dreams are hidden and disguised because you are not supposed to know where the information is coming from. They occur relatively seldom.

When you do experience them, you get the feeling that something special has occurred. Even if you can’t figure out what it means, there is a profound sense of purpose or message behind it. When experienced, they can become a landmark in your live leaving you with a permanent and unforgettable impression of otherworldliness embedded deep within your subconscious mind

What kind of dreams are we talking about in this context? Well we are talking about forecasting dreams, dreams which give us new ideas, and dreams where diseased or spirits appear to us.

Forecasting dreams
Dreams can warn us of imminent dangers and chances. If you believe your live is predestined, your dreams will only give you indication what is going to happen. If you don’t believe in predestination than dreams can give you a warning of what might happen, so that you can take the necessary prevention or they can give you an indication of your chance, so that you can use it.
Whenever you have a dream that seems significant but is unclear, you should be looking for further clarification. In such case you can go back to the source.(see below how to remember your dream) Be clear that you have unlimited knowledge of the universe available at all times. You just need to dream consciously.

Dreams who may give you new ideas.
The dreaming self is always learning, creating, and developing, it is an always evolving being who is simply another version of you. The dreaming self helps you in the creation of your daily life in very practical ways. Great social ideas and philosophies are first explored and tested in dreams, then applied in the waking environment. The dream is where probable actions are tested and refined for both the individual and for societies in general.
Some of the very important discoveries in science were made through the help of a dream.
Edison is said to have invented the light bulb with the aid of a dream. In fact he used dreams quite a lot for his ideas.
Dmitry Mendeleyev provided the world of chemistry and physics the Periodic Table of Elements in 1869. The Table, for which he nearly got the Nobel Prize in chemistry, came to him in its completed form in a dream.
Remember that all knowledge already exists in the universe. Infinite quantities of knowledge and information have not yet been transmitted to the minds of humans. Who knows how many other important and mundane discoveries remain to be accessed. We tend to think of future inventions and discoveries, but these things already exist in the knowledge bank of the universe. It’s all a matter of transmission from there to here. You can access this information through your dreams.

Visit From the Deceased or Spirit Guides
Appearances from loved ones that have passed on occur fairly frequently. In our sleeping state we are closer to them than in the waking state. The reason being that our five senses and our preconscious are at rest allowing our sixth sense or our higher self the freedom to make these communications happen.
Mediums continually practice focusing themselves so that they can attain this state in order to communicate with the deceased. This requires quite a bit of time and effort on their part. However, the dreaming person is already there.
Sometimes a deceased loved one can become a part of our dreams within coded symbols. Then through the divide and analyze interpretation technique (see below), we use the memories associated with them to understand the meaning behind that particular dream. Your subconscious uses these loved ones just like every other symbol in its composition of a dream.

Can you interpret your dreams yourself? You can!
When you venture into the realm of dream interpretation you must try to decode your dream, you need to dissect it into the separate fragments and examine each for its particular meaning. Dreams are composed of a collage of little parts of your own life experience stored away in your brain symbolically.
There is no use to utilize others experiences, as they don’t create the same symbols that your own mind has created. You need to develop your own set of interpretations for the symbols that are particular to your own life’s experiences.

Divide and conquer!
A basic strategy that military commanders have known since antiquity. Splitting your opponent’s concentrated power into sizable chunks makes it much easier to overcome him. Then he can be taken out piece by piece. This is the strategy to use in dream interpretation as well. Therefore divide and analyze!

Basic parts in most dreams:
You (you are directly involved or observing yourself).
Other actor (each one is a separate actor).
The scene (there can be more than one).
The action (there can be more than one).
The object (there can be a theme or an object involved).
The end result (not present in all dreams).

Technique to analyze your dream
== Write all the content of you dreams immediately after awakening , afterwards they are gone.
== Take every part of the dream and separate it from the rest.
== Ask yourself; what feelings this part has for you, what memories does it evoke, who and what does it remind you of, what impression do you have for it.
== Were there any common threads, common ideas, running through the written down dreams?
== Do not trouble yourself with the manifest meaning of a dream. Remember your dream is a code
== Add every notion you can come up with.
== Restrict your analysis strictly to each individual part, not how it played a role in the dream.
== Review what is going on in your life at present
== Now fit the puzzle together. Do remember that you are the only one who has the information to make the final interpretation. It’s all stored in the memory bank of your brain.

Tips to remember your dreams
== The simplest and most powerful technique of all is to have the desire to remember your dreams. Pure, passionate and true desire in any area of life cannot help, but bring your wishes into reality.
== Set your alarm clock for an unusual early time, then put down some keywords from your last dream. You will not have to follow this routine for very long before your subconscious mind begins to co-operate.
== Prior to going to sleep write your intent. Example "When I dream an important dream I fully intend to wake up sufficiently to jot it down, after which I will go back to sleep with ease and wake up in the morning feeling rested, refreshed and invigorated."
== Visualize yourself before going to sleep dreaming, waking up, writing your keywords, going back to sleep, waking up in the morning and recalling your dream again in full. Repeat the process until it becomes real for you.
== Writing a question down prior to going to sleep is a great way to aid dream recall. It helps to clarify the query in your mind, and often after you've written it down, you will already have resolved much of your query. A verbatim recall of the way in which a question was asked is often vital to the analysis and interpretation of the dream.
== Upon waking up in the morning, lie dead still and focus immediately on recalling your dreams. Don't move until you've remembered something from the dream state.
== Relax after waking up in the morning and keep telling yourself that you will remember your dreams
== If you wake up in the night and you have dreamed, write it down immediately, because in the morning the remembrance is gone.
== Given that dreams often set the mood tone for the day, following the thread of your dominant feelings upon waking often leads to dream recall. Simply focus on your dominant feeling e.g. happy, sad, disturbed etc without getting swept into the emotions behind it. Usually some dream associations will begin coming to mind.
== Create a comfortable sleeping environment
== If you can't remember a dream, when you wake up, just write the first words that come to your mind, as you look at them, a dream may come back to you.
== If you really get stuck, you can think about dreams you have had before, especially those that are reoccurring.
== As soon as you begin to recall fragments of the dream, scribble down some keywords. The idea behind the notepad is to write down some simple keywords, which are usually sufficient to get your memory working when you review it in the morning.

Compare your dreams
== Develop a journal for your dreams and write your observations in it.
== Which dreams are most disturbing? Why? What do they mean to you?
== What common symbols or objects reoccur? What do you think these symbols mean?
== Were you able to control your dreams as you remembered more and more of them?
== How are your dreams relevant to your waking life?
== What seems to be the main function of your dreams?

You regularly pass into other dimensions when you dream, but the acceleration of consciousness that takes place in certain phases of the dream is usually too hard for you to follow. Through mental training and meditation your normal consciousness can be taught to respond to and incorporate new ways of perceiving information.
Within dreams there are laws that govern energy and a physic, that has rules, which can be translated and understood. Stop trivializing your psychological experiences, stop pretending you are not having inner experiences, and give your subconscious the respect and attention that it deserves. By doing so, you will enrich yourself in unimaginable ways, and you may even create a cosmic being capable of multidimensional experience.
You can create this being starting tonight, by exploring your own dreams with a new attitude, an attitude shaped by the belief in the validity and divine purpose of the dream state.

Easy isn’t it? Good luck!