Of all the components of a good night's sleep, dreams seem to be last within our control. In dreams, a window opens into a world where there is zero logic and dead people can speak. A century ago, Freud formulated  his revolutionary theory that dreams were the hidden shadows of our unconscious desires and fears; by the late 1970s, neurologists  had switched to thinking of them as just "mental noise"--the random byproducts  of the neural repair work that goes on during sleep. Now researchers suspect that dreams are regulating moods while the brain is "offline". And one leading authority says that these intensely powerful mental events actually can be bought under conscious control, to help us sleep and feel better. "It's your dream," says Rosalind Cartwright, chair of psychology at Chicago's Medical Center. "If you don't like it, change it." Evidence from brain imaging supports this view. The brain is as active during rapid eye movement sleep when most vivid dreams occur as it is when fully awake, says Dr. Eric Nofzinger at the University of Pittsburgh. But not all parts of the brain are equally involved: the limbic system or the emotional brain is especially active, while the prefrontal cortex--the center of intellect and reasoning, is relatively quiet. "We wake up from dreams happy or depressed, and those feelings can stay with us all day," says Stanford sleep researcher Dr. William Dement. This link is shown among the patients in Cartwright's clinic. Most people seem to have more bad dreams early in the night, progressing toward happier ones before awakening, suggesting that they are working through negative feelings generated during the day. Because our conscious mind is occupied with daily life we don't always think about the emotional significance of the day's events--until, it appears, we begin to dream. There is probably little reason to pay attention to our dreams at all unless they keep us from sleeping or "We wake up in a panic," Cartwright says. Those suffering from persistent nightmares should seek help from a therapist. For the rest of us, the brain has its ways of working through bad feelings. Sleep or rather dream on it and you'll feel better in the morning. What does Rosalind Cartwright think of dreams?
Dreamers can exercise conscious control over them. They are shadows of our unconscious desires and fears. People with more emotional changes dream more often. They are actually products of our brain's neural repairs.