A series of thoughts, images or emotions occurring during sleep. Dreaming is a universal and powerful experience �?all humans sleep, and all humans dream. Dreams can be fleeting fragments of images or entire complicated narratives unreeling like movies before the mind's eye. The visions can appear benign or soothing, or they can inspire heart-pounding terror. They can be peopled with friends and loved ones or commanded by horrifying monsters. Dreams can mimic reality or create a totally surreal environment. They can be clear and detailed or jumbled and confused. They may impart wisdom or knowledge, or they may leave the dreamer completely baffled by their content.      What are dreams? Where do they come from? And what significance, if any, do they hold for the dreamer's life? The variety of answers set forth to these questions over time reflects the values and the social and psychological structures of various cultures. Ancient peoples, among them the Egyptians and the Greeks, believed dreams were messages sent by the gods to sleeping minds. The father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, thought that dreams, created by the human brain, could serve as windows into the psyche, revealing a cache of wishes unfulfilled, and many of his followers today consider such visions to be a major tool in psychoanalysis.      On the other hand, some scientists have theorized that dreams are unnecessary bits of information being expunged nightly from a person's memory, just as a computer's files are cleaned of unwanted data. The ancients regarded sleep as a second life, a life in which the soul freed from the body was supposedly much more active than during the waking state. And researchers into the paranormal, in some ways echoing the ancients, believe dreams may have a psychic element, revealing the forces of destiny, the reality that is about to happen. Lets step into the world of dreams and explore the rich symbolisms and diversity. Lucid Dreams Dream Times     Image ~ Astral Voyage ~  by Josephine Wall