1. What purpose do dreams serve?
Why do we dream?
What purpose do dreams serve?
While many theories have been proposed, no single consensus has emerged …
Moral of this cartoon?
Cats are lazy … and evil!

2. DREAM THEORIES A. Psychoanalytic Theory of Dreams
Freud said that dreams were a representation of unconscious desires, thoughts and motivations.
Freud believed that people are driven by aggressive and sexual instincts that are repressed from conscious awareness but find their way into our awareness via dreams.
Freud believed that in order to interpret our dreams, we needed to understand the following ideas …
Manifest content is made up of the actual images, thoughts and content contained within the dream
Latent content represents the hidden psychological meaning of the dream.

3. Saturday morning cartoons
B. Activation- Synthesis Model of Dreaming
According to this theory, circuits in the brain become are still active during REM sleep, but because our bodies cannot move (because of atonia), the brain synthesizes and interprets this internal activity and attempts to find meaning in these signals, which results in dreaming.
C. INFORMATION PROCESSING (DE-FRAGGING)
This theory is based on computer metaphor to account for dreams. According to this theory, dreams serve to 'clean up' clutter from the mind, much like clean-up operations in a computer, refreshing the mind to prepare for the next day.
Saturday morning cartoons
Dreaming does for the brain what Saturday-morning cartoons do for the kids -- it keeps them sufficiently entertained so that the serious players in the household can get needed recovery time. Without such diversion, the brain would be urging us up and out into the world to keep it fully engaged.

4. E. PROBLEM SOLVING
Dreams function as psychotherapy
1. dreamer is seeking to get clarity or make connections between different desires, thoughts and emotions in a safe environment .
2. dreaming helps disconnect painful emotions from our memory … so that when we are awake, the memories are not as harmful to us.
Newer research has suggested that in terms of practical problem solving, the two areas dreams are especially likely to help are
anything where vivid visualization contributes to the solution
any problem where the solution lies in thinking outside the box—i.e. where the person is stuck because the conventional wisdom on how to approach the problem is wrong.