Everyone of us dreams on and off throughout each night, no matter how vehemently some of us may deny it. True, we probably don't remember even a fraction of our dreams, but laboratory tests have shown that all our brains are busy while we are asleep. Exactly why we dream isn't fully understood, but there's little doubt dreams act as a kind of safety valve, helping us to sift through our waking experiences, and to reconcile conflicting feelings about our lives. In this way, dreams can be of great value in understanding our problems and in getting to know ourselves better.

The language of dreams is undeniably puzzling, and yet it does have a logic of its own. To help you understand your dreams it's a good idea to keep a dream journal by your bedside so that you can capture the fleeting details the moment you awake. Note down not just what happens in the dream but the mood and feelings it evokes. Over the months you should begin to see a pattern in your dreaming. One thing's for sure, the more you study your dreams, the more you will be amazed at how clever your mind is. In dreams we become artists, dramatists and poets, conjuring up marvelous imagery.

Sometimes the messages of our dreams simply resolve around recognizable people, objects and events which are out of their normal context, but surprisingly the dream message will often involve a pun, either visual or verbal.

Along with symbols that are special to us, there is the amazing phenomenon of universal symbols, the idea that we are all born knowing a shared dream language. This arises from what Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called "the collective unconscious. All over the world people are dreaming in the same symbolic language every night, with only slight differences according to culture and customs. If you find it hard to accept, ask around your friends and family and you'll see how many of them regularly dream of the following:

WATER: It's our emotional life that's being focused on when we dream of water. A flood can indicate we are being overwhelmed by emotion. Or the water may be stagnant and murky, turbulent or calm, showing various feelings in our waking lives.

JOURNEYS: Whatever the mode of transport, a travelling dream symbolizes our journey through life. If we dream we keep missing buses or planes we should not panic. It means we are anxious, but that any real life setbacks are only temporary.

FLYING: Flying can show that the dreamer suffers from a lack of confidence and would like to feel more on tops of things, and to rise above difficulties.

SITTING AN EXAM: When we dream we're sitting an exam we feel ill-prepared for, it may be a sign that we fear we're about to face a test in life we won't be able to cope with.

Recurring dreams can be disturbing, and dream analysts say they indicate that we need to take another look at events in our lives — things which we thought we understood the significance of but perhaps didn't.

Can dreams foretell the future? This is the $64,000 question. There are plenty of people who claim to have dreamed the results of horse races, which must come in handy. All too many people have foreseen tragedies such as the TITANIC disaster in their dreams. I personally have no doubt that the future can occasionally be glimpsed in dreams.

FREUD AND DREAMS

According to the Freudian theory, dreams don't reveal anything about the future. Instead they tell us something about our present unresolved and unconscious complexes and may lead us back to the early years of our lives, when, according to psycho-analytic theory, the ground was being prepared for these later defects. There are three main hypotheses in this general theory.

The first hypothesis is that the dream is not a meaningless jumble of images and ideas, accidentally thrown together, but rather that the dream is a whole, and every element in it is meaningful. This idea is a very ancient one. For Freud it follows directly from the deterministic standpoint: i.e., from the view that all mental and physical events have causes and could be predicted if these causes were fully known. This is a philosophical notion with which few scientists would wish to quarrel. Freud's argument of the meaningfulness of dreams is directly connected with his general theory that all our acts are meaningfully determined; a theory which embraces mispronunciations, gestures, lapses, emotions and soforth.

The second point that Freud makes is that dreams are always in some sense a wish fulfillment; in other words, they have a purpose, and this purpose is the satisfaction of some desire or drive, usually of an unconscious character. This is linked up with his general theory of personality. Roughly speaking, Freud recognizes three main parts of personality: one, which he calls the id, is a kind of reservoir, as it were, provides the dynamic energy for most of our activities. Opposed to it we have the so-called super-ego, which is partly conscious and partly unconscious and which is the repository of social morality. Intervening between the two, and trying to resolve their opposition, is the ego; i.e., the conscious part of our personality.

Thirdly, Freud believes that desires and wishes, having been repressed from consciousness because they are unacceptable to the socialized mind of the dreamer, are not allowed to emerge even into the dream without disguise. A censor or super-ego watches over them and ensures that they can only emerge into the dream in a disguise so heavy that they are unrecognizable.

The link-up between Freud's theory of personality and his theory of dream interpretation is a very simple one: the forces of the id are constantly trying to gain control of the ego and to force themselves into consciousness. During the individual's waking life, the super-ego firmly represses them and keeps them unconscious; during sleep, however, the super-ego is less watchful, and consequently some of the desires start up in the id and are allowed to escape in the form of dreams. However, the super-ego may nod, but it is not quite asleep, and consequently these wish-fulfilling thoughts require to be heavily disguised. This disguise is stage-managed by what Freud calls the dream work. Accordingly, it is necessary to distinguish between the manifest dream, i.e. the dream as experienced and perhaps written down, and the latent dream, i.e. the thoughts, wishes, and desires expressed in the dream with their disguises removed. The task of the analyst and interpreter on this view is to explain the manifest dream in terms of the latent dream.

THINKING

Psychologists have concentrated on thinking as an intellectual exertion aimed at finding an answer to a question or the solution of a practical problem. Cognitive psychology is a branch of psychology that investigates internal mental processes such as problem solving, memory, and language. The school of thought arising from this approach is known as cognitivism which is interested in how people mentally represent information processing. It had its foundations in the Gestalt psychology of Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka, and in the work of Jean Piaget, who provided a theory of stages/phases that describe children's cognitive development.

Cognitive psychologists use psychophysical and experimental approaches to understand, diagnose, and solve problems, concerning themselves with the mental processes which mediate between stimulus and response. They study various aspects of thinking, including the psychology of reasoning, and how people make decisions and choices, solve problems, as well as engage in creative discovery and imaginative thought. Cognitive theory contends that solutions to problems take the form of algorithms—rules that are not necessarily understood but promise a solution, or heuristics—rules that are understood but that do not always guarantee solutions. Cognitive science differs from cognitive psychology in that algorithms that are intended to simulate human behavior are implemented or implementable on a computer. In other instances, solutions may be found through insight, a sudden awareness of relationships.

In developmental psychology, Jean Piaget was a pioneer in the study of the development of thought from birth to maturity. In his theory of cognitive development, thought is based on actions on the environment. That is, Piaget suggests that the environment is understood through assimilations of objects in the available schemes of action and these accommodate to the objects to the extent that the available schemes fall short of the demands. As a result of this interplay between assimilation and accommodation, thought develops through a sequence of stages that differ qualitatively from each other in mode of representation and complexity of inference and understanding. That is, thought evolves from being based on perceptions and actions at the sensorimotor stage in the first two years of life to internal representations in early childhood. Subsequently, representations are gradually organized into logical structures which first operate on the concrete properties of the reality, in the stage of concrete operations, and then operate on abstract principles that organize concrete properties, in the stage of formal operations. In recent years, the Piagetian conception of thought was integrated with information processing conceptions. Thus, thought is considered as the result of mechanisms that are responsible for the representation and processing of information. In this conception, speed of processing, cognitive control, and working memory are the main functions underlying thought. In the neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development, the development of thought is considered to come from increasing speed of processing, enhanced cognitive control, and increasing working memory.

Positive psychology emphasizes the positive aspects of human psychology as equally important as the focus on mood disorders and other negative symptoms. In Character Strengths and Virtues, Peterson and Seligman list a series of positive characteristics. One person is not expected to have every strength, nor are they meant to fully capsulate that characteristic entirely. The list encourages positive thought that builds on a person's strengths, rather than how to "fix" their "symptoms."