After antiquity, the passive hearing of visitation dreams largely gave way to visualized narratives in which the dreamer becomes a character who actively participates. From the 1940s to 1985, Calvin S. Hall collected more than 50,000 dream reports at Western Reserve University. In 1966, Hall and Robert Van de Castle published The Content Analysis of Dreams, in which they outlined a coding system to study 1,000 dream reports from college students. Results indicated that participants from varying parts of the world demonstrated similarity in their dream content. The only residue of antiquitys authoritative dream figure in the Hall and Van de Castle listing of dream characters is the inclusion of God in the category of prominent persons. Halls complete dream reports were made publicly available in the mid-1990s by his protégé William Domhoff. More recent studies of dream reports, while providing more detail, continue to cite the Hall study favorably. In the Hall study, the most common emotion experienced in dreams was anxiety. Other emotions included abandonment, anger, fear, joy, and happiness. Negative emotions were much more common than positive ones. The Hall data analysis showed that sexual dreams occur no more than 10% of the time and are more prevalent in young to mid-teens. Another study showed that 8% of both mens and womens dreams have sexual content. In some cases, sexual dreams may result in orgasms or nocturnal emissions.
J. W. Dunne wrote: But there can be no reasonable doubt that the idea of a soul must have first arisen in the mind of primitive man as a result of observation of his dreams. Ignorant as he was, he could have come to no other conclusion but that, in dreams, he left his sleeping body in one universe and went wandering off into another. It is considered that, but for that savage, the idea of such a thing as a soul would never have even occurred to mankind....

Hindu
In the Mandukya Upanishad, part of the Veda scriptures of Indian Hinduism, a dream is one of three states that the soul experiences during its lifetime, the other two states being the waking state and the sleep state. The earliest Upanishads, written before 300 BCE, emphasize two meanings of dreams. The first says that dreams are merely expressions of inner desires. The second is the belief of the soul leaving the body and being guided until awakened. Abrahamic
In Judaism, dreams are considered part of the experience of the world that can be interpreted and from which lessons can be garnered. It is discussed in the Talmud, Tractate Berachot 55–60. The ancient Hebrews connected their dreams heavily with their religion, though the Hebrews were monotheistic and believed that dreams were the voice of one God alone. Hebrews also differentiated between good dreams (from God) and bad dreams (from evil spirits). The Hebrews, like many other ancient cultures, incubated dreams in order to receive a divine revelation.