It’s crazy to think that while we sleep our body creates a series of images that only occurs while we sleep. They can be entertaining, fun, romantic, disturbing, frightening and sometimes even  bizarre. When I was little I use to imagine the weirdest things; I would be living as the princess in my favorite fairytale or falling from the empire state building. Whatever it might have been, something would always trigger me to roll over and open my eyes, ending my dream and on occasion not remembering what happened. But why? Why must our body create “dreams” while we sleep and why do we not always remember.

Medical News today describes dreams as a universal human experience that can be described as a state of consciousness characterized by sensory, cognitive and emotional occurrences during sleep. The dreamer has reduced control over the content, visual images and activation of the memory.

But believe it or not everyone dreams, even when you don’t remember your dream everyone dreams for at least 30 minutes a night. Dreams happen for physical, mental, emotional and even spiritual reasons, and there is widespread agreement that dreams can present opportunities for creativity, growth, health and wholeness. Dreams help us know ourselves better.

Studies say we forget most of our dreams soon after waking up. Our forgetfulness is generally attributed to neurochemical conditions in the brain that occur during sleep.”The best way to remember your dreams is to simply stay put when you wake up,” says Loewenberg.

There are several types of dreams, 9 to be exact as said by Kim Quindlen in the Thought Catalog. The first dream is “A dream about your teeth” a dream like this may involve your teeth falling out, breaking apart, coming out from a slight tap. “The naked dream” most experts say that this represents deep feelings of vulnerability and shamefulness within you. You’re worried about being exposed, noticed, or ridiculed by others. “The falling dream” is a red flag that something in your life is heading in the wrong direction. Job, finances, relationships, it’s also a sign of depression. “The dream where you can’t walk”, when you feel like as much as you try you can’t move this occurs because you have low self-esteem and lack confidence in a situation going on in your life. “The flying dream” are pleasant, happy, and exhilarating. Flying dreams are often lucid dreams, which means that you’re aware of the fact that you’re dreaming. When people have lucid dreams, they start controlling the plot of their dream. “The dream where you think you woke up but you didnt” aka false alarming. Most of the time the dream occurs when you’re avoiding something in the day to come but you never intend to wake up late. Many times people are sleeping but their dream entails them walking up, checking their phone, getting dressed etc. “Having to pee dream”, in actuality there is no science behind this. Its best to just get up and go to the bathroom.

The question of whether dreams actually have a physiological or psychological function has not been answered yet.  But that hasn’t stopped scientists from researching and speculating. Some scientist believe that we dream in order to exercise some neutral connections that affect certain types of learning. It’s not said for sure that that’s why we dream but many scientist have done experiments to try and connect the two. . Some researchers think dreaming might have evolved for physiological reasons. There is a great deal of neuronal activity occurring while we sleep, especially in rapid eye movement, and it has been suggested that dreams may just be meaningless.