Dreams are like movies that play behind our eyes as we sleepWe often don’t remember our dreams, though it is said, that all of us dream for a part of the night.

When we have nightmare we start the day on a bad note, often we are relieved that we have woken up, so that we could escape the terrible dream. In our bad dreams we are often chased by a pursuer, we experience the fear and agony of that encounter vividly in our dreams. We can even recollect all the details even after we wake up. Sometimes, we are able to accomplish unusual feats like flying, jumping from a cliff, or walking on water in our dreams.

 After centuries of research, Psychiatrists have been able to crack a few more of the codes about dreams that run through our head as we sleep. They offer explanations on, where dreams come from and how much do they affect us.

Sigmund Freud is the Father of dream interpretation. His student and follower Karl Yung also did more research on dream related subjects. According to Sigmund Freud, most of the things that we see in our dreams have some sexual connotation.Any pen, pencil or elongated object according to Freud represented the male sexual organ. A bowl, or a concave shaped article represented the female vagina. Freud said ,that when we dream of snakes it shows our desire for sex.

Though sex is of course, a major driving force in all living beings, modern research has found out more detailed understanding of human mind, and how it is linked to dreams.

Recent research by Joseph De Koninck, a Canadian Psychology professor, has said that dreams and their association with different objects throws light of the personnae of an individual. The dreamers may be better able than others to recognize the link between the details in their dreams and their daily activities and memories.”

Dreams can also tell us about our relationship, and the way it is going. Sometimes we push things under the carpet and live our life without dealing with the problem. We do not want to address such things head on. Whether it is a dysfunctional marriage or a dysfunctional relationship, dealing with it takes it toll in our lives. But if we get any recurrent dreams regarding the relationship, then may be it is wiser to deal with it and face the consequence.

Today’s psychologists agree with Freud and Jung, that dreams are often our repressed thoughts. Five dreams out of seven are negativeand considered nightmares. Nightmares can be triggered by stress, anxiety, depression and medications.

Recurring dreams or nightma res, however might indicate a person has an unresolved issue or trauma in their past. But nightmares can be banished. In order to banish a night mare, we really have to work hard. Our conscious thought process has to change; we have to find a positive ending to the nightmare that affects us and think about it like an ending of a story. With this conscious effort on our part our thought deals with the crisis. If we are able to think positively all the time, our night mare will go away and we will not be dreaming about the scary endings.

Our thoughts often need reiteration. This is best done when we write down. We have to think and write. When we are writing about our nightmares, we can modify the scary parts and write about something pleasant. After writing down the whole dream and modifying it, read it once more. This whole path of writing down with modification helps in making the ‘monster’ goes

Sometimes dreams give us guidelines to our future. Sometimes we are not sure what we really want to do. Dreams sometimes show us something that awakens our inner latent desire and we do it. If our career is not going the way we want to, a dream which shows some other career oppotunitiy might awaken our inner desire of following a different path.

Though nightmares are scary and trouble us, there are dreams of childhood and other times, which have such euphoric qualities that one awakens with a smile. Scientists have also found through scans, that the emotions centre of the brain- the limbic system – is active during sleep, which might explain why dreams are so full of feelings.Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex, which controls logic, is less active, which is why you can fly and come up with imaginative slolutions.The real secret to tapping into power of your dreams is to be open to where they are taking you and not to shirk difficult messages and mightmares. You may not always have sweet dreams but they are guaranteed to be magical and insightful.