Dreams as Efforts to Deal with Problems One modern explanation of dreams holds that they reflect the ongoing conscious preoccupations of waking life, such as concerns over relationships, work, sex, or health (Cartwright, 1977; Hall, 1953a, 1953b). In this problem-focused approach to dreaming, the symbols and metaphors in a dream do not disguise its true meaning; they convey it. Psychologist Gayle Delaney once told of a woman who dreamed she was swimming underwater. The woman's 8-year-old son was on her back, his head above the water. Her husband was supposed to take a picture of them, but for some reason he wasn't doing it, and she was starting to feel as if she were going to drown. To Delaney, the message was obvious: The woman was “drowning” under the responsibilities of childcare and her husband wasn't “getting the picture” (in Dolnick, 1990).

The problem-focused explanation of dreaming is supported by findings that dreams are more likely to contain material related to a person's current concerns than chance would predict (Domhoff, 1996). Among college students, who are often worried about grades and tests, test-anxiety dreams are common: The dreamer is unprepared for or unable to finish an exam, or shows up for the wrong exam, or can't find the room where the exam is being given. Traumatic experiences can also affect people's dreams. In a cross-cultural study in which children kept dream diaries for a week, Palestinian children living in neighborhoods under threat of violence reported more themes of persecution and violence than did Finnish or Palestinian children living in peaceful environments (Punamaeki & Joustie, 1998).

Some psychologists believe that dreams not only reflect our waking concerns but also provide us with an opportunity to resolve them. According to Rosalind Cartwright (2010), in people suffering from the grief of divorce, recovery is related to a particular pattern of dreaming: The first dream of the night often comes sooner than it ordinarily would, lasts longer, and is more emotional and story-like. Depressed people's dreams tend to become less negative and more positive as the night wears on, and this pattern, too, predicts recovery (Cartwright et al., 1998). Cartwright concluded that getting through a crisis or a rough period in life takes “time, good friends, good genes, good luck, and a good dream system.”

Dreams as Thinking Like the problem-focused approach, the cognitive approach to dreaming emphasizes current concerns, but it makes no claims about problem solving during sleep. In this view, dreaming is simply a modification of the cognitive activity that goes on when we are awake. In dreams, we construct reasonable simulations of the real world, drawing on the same kinds of memories, knowledge, metaphors, and assumptions about the world that we do when we are not sleeping (Antrobus, 1991, 2000; Foulkes & Domhoff, 2014). Thus, the content of our dreams may include thoughts, concepts, and scenarios that may or may not be related to our daily problems. We are most likely to dream about our families, friends, studies, jobs, worries, or recreational interests—topics that also occupy our waking thoughts.

In the cognitive view, the brain is doing the same kind of work during dreams as it does when we are awake; indeed, parts of the cerebral cortex involved in perceptual and cognitive processing during the waking hours are highly active during dreaming. The difference is that when we are asleep we are cut off from sensory input and feedback from the world and our bodily movements; the only input to the brain is its own output. Therefore, our dreaming thoughts tend to be more unfocused and diffuse than our waking ones—unless we're daydreaming. Our brains show similar patterns of activity when we are night dreaming as when we are daydreaming—a finding that suggests that nighttime dreaming, like daydreaming, might be a mechanism for simulating events that we think (or fear) might occur in the future (Domhoff, 2011).

The cognitive view predicts that if a person could be totally cut off from all external stimulation while awake, mental activity would be much like that during dreaming, with the same hallucinatory quality.The cognitive approach also predicts that as cognitive abilities and brain connections mature during childhood, dreams should change in nature, and they do. Toddlers may not dream at all in the sense that adults do. And although young children may experience visual images during sleep, their cognitive limitations keep them from creating true narratives until age 7 or 8 (Foulkes, 1999). Their dreams are infrequent and tend to be bland and static, and are often about everyday things (“I saw a dog; I was sitting”). But as they grow up, their dreams gradually become more and more intricate and story-like.

Dreams as Interpreted Brain Activity A third modern approach to dreaming, the activation–synthesis theory, draws heavily on physiological research and aims to explain not why you might dream about a test when you are about to take one, but why you might dream about being a cat that turns into a hippo that plays in a rock band. Often dreams just don't make sense; indeed, most are bizarre, illogical, or both. According to the activation–synthesis explanation, first proposed by psychiatrist J. Allan Hobson (1988, 1990), these dreams are not “children of an idle brain,” as Shakespeare called them. They are largely the result of neurons firing spontaneously in the pons (in the lower part of the brain) during REM sleep. These neurons control eye movement, gaze, balance, and posture, and they send messages to sensory and motor areas of the cortex responsible during wakefulness for visual processing and voluntary action.

According to this view, the signals originating in the pons have no psychological meaning in themselves. But the cortex tries to make sense of them by synthesizing, or integrating, them with existing knowledge and memories to produce some sort of coherent interpretation. This is just what the cortex does when signals come from sense organs during ordinary wakefulness. The idea that one part of the brain interprets what has gone on in other parts, whether you are awake or asleep, is consistent with many modern theories of how the brain works.

When neurons fire in the part of the brain that handles balance, for instance, the cortex may generate a dream about falling. When signals occur that would ordinarily produce running, the cortex may manufacture a dream about being chased. Because the signals from the pons occur randomly, the cortex's interpretation—the dream—is likely to be incoherent and confusing. And because the cortical neurons that control the initial storage of new memories are turned off during sleep, we typically forget our dreams upon waking unless we write them down or immediately recount them to someone else.

Since Hobson's original formulation, he and his colleagues have refined and modified this theory (Hobson, Pace-Schott, & Stickgold, 2000; Hobson et al., 2011; Tranquillo, 2014). The brain stem, they say, sets off responses in emotional and visual parts of the brain. At the same time, brain regions that handle logical thought and sensations from the external world shut down. These changes could further account for the fact that dreams are often emotionally charged, hallucinatory, and illogical.

In sum, in this view, wishes do not cause dreams; brain mechanisms do. Dream content, says Hobson (2002), may be “as much dross as gold, as much cognitive trash as treasure, and as much informational noise as a signal of something.” But that does not mean dreams are always meaningless. Hobson (1988) has argued that the brain “is so inexorably bent upon the quest for meaning that it attributes and even creates meaning when there is little or none to be found in the data it is asked to process.” By studying these attributed meanings, you can learn about your unique perceptions, conflicts, and concerns—not by trying to dig below the surface of the dream, as Freud would, but by examining the surface itself. Or you can relax and enjoy the nightly entertainment that dreams provide.