In this article I hope to open a window into the vast and mysterious world of dreams. For most people, information about dreams is not common knowledge. In researching this topic, however, I discovered that everyone has and responds to dreams, which are vital to mental health. You will also discover how you can influence your dreams and how they influence you. All over the world, different people, scientists, and civilizations have different theories about dreams. For example, the Senoi tribe in Malaysia has a fascinating tradition of dream telling. Every morning the people of the tribe begin the day by discussing and interpreting their dreams with each other. Children, as they grow, actually learn to control their dreams by simply turning bad dreams into good ones. It is observed that by paying homage to their dreams, the people of the Senoi tribe learn to have faith in themselves. Furthermore, they have very few, if any, mental problems, “could working constructively with dreams be part of the answer” to mental problems? (Peirce)Alongside tradition there are also many theories about dreams. Sigmund Freud, the first psychologist to study dreams in depth, hypothesized that dreams were just subconscious thoughts. He believed that dreams show desires and thoughts in symbolic form that are not acceptable on a conscious level. He used the term manifest content to describe the content of dreams, and the term latent content to indicate the hidden meanings behind symbolic dreams. Freud's theory, however, is only one of many, like that of Francis Crick. He believed that dreams were a way to mentally “clean house” or get rid of unnecessary memories. He thought they were useful because you don't have to remember every little detail of your life....half of a sheet of paper...results. An interesting thing found is that although dreams are thought to happen in the blink of an eye, they actually happen in a realistic time frame (Background Information). Another is that dreams generally take place in familiar settings and are random thoughts left over from the previous day. What's interesting, though, is that during studies in which participants were woken up regularly, scientists found that the dreams they recalled the following morning were "more coherent, sexier, and generally more interesting" than the dream descriptions collected in the data. for research. . Most participants remembered very little of their dreams and only about the last fifteen minutes of the dream before waking up. In conclusion, I hope you have learned something about dreams that you didn't have before and that you now realize that it's not "just a dream"..”