Why We Dream – And What to Do With Them

Have you ever woken up certain that a dream was trying to tell you something?

I think my most impactful dream to date was a deathy one. I was living and working in New Zealand at the time and had been travelling for about 3 years. I was often wafting about volunteering somewhere and in the dream I was somewhere I didn't recognise, but it seemed to be an all female, all black boarding house of some kind that I was working or volunteering at.

Everyone seemed to be going about their business cooking or cleaning something until a man let himself in through the front door and opened fire. I saw him from the corridor and immediately knew we would all die, but I ran sideways through an open doorway and moved to the far corner to hide.

But as I cowered there with my arms wrapped around my knees I felt the washing basket ripped away that I'd been hiding behind. I felt the barrel of the gun pressed to the top of my head and then the silent sensation of warm blood covering the back of my head and neck. Despite the violence of the dream, it felt a surprisingly peaceful ending and I sat with that feeling for a few moments before waking up.

For days afterwards I was spaced. It was such a vivid dream and I'd always been told that dying in a dream isn't supposed to happen - you'll always wake up first - so this felt like some kind of wild premonition. 

As it turns out it may have been, but not directly. A week later I was suffering with excruciating headaches and found myself in the hospital waiting room for a CT Scan. But it turns out my glands were swollen and I just had an awful tension headache from my desk job. But I did develop a cyst in the back of my head (which is still there 9 years later) which may have been what my dream-gunman was trying to highlight!

Where Do Dreams Come From?

Dreams most often occur during REM sleep—that’s the stage when your brain is highly active, your eyes dart rapidly under closed lids, and your body stays mostly still. In REM, brain regions linked to emotion and memory (the limbic system) are highly active, while the logical thinking hub (the prefrontal cortex) is quieter.

One classic explanation is the Activation–Synthesis Theory (Hobson & McCarley, 1977), which suggests dreams happen when the brain tries to weave random electrical activity into a story, like a mental jigsaw puzzle made from whatever images, emotions, and memories happen to be lying around.

More recent research suggests dreams may serve important purposes, like processing emotions, consolidating memories, and helping us make sense of ourselves (Domhoff, 2000). The default mode network (the part of the brain active when we’re daydreaming or thinking about ourselves) remains switched on during dreams, which could explain why they often feel deeply personal.

How Dreams Form

Dreams are rarely straight replays of daily life. Instead, they’re more like collages, blending:

• Fragments of memory (both recent and long past)

• Emotional leftovers from the day

• Stray sensory input while sleeping (like a sound, temperature shift, or light)

Factors like stress, medication, and even what you eat can change dream content (Griffin & Tyrrell, 2004). People with trauma or PTSD often experience recurring dreams linked to their experiences (Hartmann, 2010).

Your brain is a storyboard editor, cutting and pasting images, feelings, and sensations into a surreal, often nonsensical but sometimes telling night-time film.

How People Experience Dreams Differently

Some people remember multiple dreams every night, others only a handful each year.

• Lucid dreamers can realise they’re dreaming and even influence the plot (LaBerge & Rheingold, 1990).

• Children often dream in more fantastical ways, while older adults tend to have calmer, more realistic dreams.

• Sleep disorders like narcolepsy or sleep apnoea can cause vivid, unusual dream experiences (Nielsen, 2010).

The way we dream is as individual as the way we think.

Night Terrors: Dreams Turn to Distress

Night terrors are not just “bad dreams.” They’re intense episodes of fear, screaming, or physical thrashing that typically occur during deep non-REM sleep, often in the first few hours after falling asleep (Ohayon et al., 1997).

Unlike nightmares, which you can usually recall, night terrors often leave you with little or no memory of the event, though your heart may be racing, and your body flooded with adrenaline. They’re more common in children, but adults can experience them too, sometimes linked to stress, trauma, sleep deprivation, or certain medications.

For some, night terrors are rare and isolated; for others, they can happen in clusters during high-stress periods.
Managing them can include:

• Improving sleep hygiene – consistent bedtime, avoiding caffeine/alcohol before bed.

• Reducing stress – mindfulness, breathing exercises, therapy.

• Tracking triggers – keeping a sleep journal to note patterns.

• Medical advice – if they’re frequent or dangerous, consult a sleep specialist.

Night terrors are startling and unpleasant, like your brain pulling the fire alarm when there’s no actual fire. But they are often a sign that your brain needs a calmer, more secure environment to rest in.

My mum believes I used to have night terrors as a child, but of course I can't remember them, only that I used to wake up screaming a lot as a kid... In my adult life I have experienced something that I thought counted as a night terror, but actually, on researching this topic, I discovered has a whole other name... hypnopompic confusion.

Vivid Dream Confusion: When the Dream Spills Into Waking Life

Very vivid, often stressful dreams where you slowly wake, briefly confusing your surroundings with elements from the dream. This is different from night terrors.

This is closer to hypnopompic confusion or sleep inertia, where the brain hasn’t fully switched from dream mode to waking perception. It happens more often with vivid REM dreams, stress, or irregular sleep.

You may recall every detail of the dream, yet for a few seconds or minutes after waking, those dream images feel superimposed onto your real environment.
I spent a few months working on a cattle station in Australia, where I was faced with my biggest animal kingdom phobia on a daily basis... COWS.

Cows have always had a vendetta against me and my family in the UK, so taking an agricultural job for my second working holiday visa as a station hand seemed like a great idea for my mental health - Not!

I went through a phase where I would wake up in the night standing on my bed and shouting. On one particularly memorable occasion it was because Steve, our station manager, was drafting cattle in through my bedroom window while I was trying to sleep, so I stood on my bed to avoid being trampled by the cattle, while shouting "Steve, you can't do that, I have to sleep here!". As I started to wake up, gripping at the shiplap walls with my fingernails, I was trying to make sense of the room around me but there was still a white cow in there, still calmly looking at me. That cow was a plastic bag I'd been using as a bin, hanging next to my bedside table, and Steve's silhouette at the edge of the window was just my curtain half resting on the windowsill.

The Many Meanings of Dreams

Scientific view: Many neuroscientists argue dreams are by-products of brain activity, without hidden messages (Domhoff, 2000).

Freud: Saw dreams as “the royal road to the unconscious,” with strange storylines masking repressed desires (Freud, 1900).

Jung: Believed dreams draw on a collective unconscious of symbols shared by all humans, helping us integrate different parts of ourselves. He acknowledged that sometimes dreams feel predictive, though he saw this more as psychological than supernatural (Jung, 1964).

Cultural traditions: From Aboriginal “Dreamtime” to shamanic dreamwork, many cultures view dreams as messages from ancestors or the spirit world (Krippner, 1994).

Medium Tyler Henry, known for Hollywood Medium, often speaks about dreams as a channel for visitations from loved ones who have passed. He describes these dreams as feeling different — calm, clear, and emotionally reassuring — rather than confusing or symbolic. According to Henry, these experiences are “a way for those who’ve passed to let us know they’re at peace” (Smith, 2020).

While science cannot confirm this interpretation, some grief research supports the idea that “visitation dreams” can be emotionally healing, helping people cope with loss and find closure (Wright et al., 2014). Critics caution that these experiences, though meaningful, can also be explained by the brain’s emotional processing during REM sleep (Hines, 2003).

Precognitive Dreams and Déjà-rêvé

Some dreams leave us with a strange sense that we’ve glimpsed the future or re-lived something from before. Science takes these reports seriously enough to study but usually offers grounded explanations.

Precognitive Dreams

Survey research shows around 42–60% of people have experienced at least one dream they felt came true (Fukuda, 2002; Watt et al., 2014). However, psychologists note that confirmation bias (noticing hits but forgetting misses), emotional salience, and coincidence can explain most cases (Mossbridge & Radin, 2018).

Historical anecdotes add intrigue: Abraham Lincoln reportedly dreamt of his own death, and Carl Jung described dreams that seemed to foreshadow later events (Jung, 1964). J. W. Dunne (1927) meticulously logged dreams and matched them to real-life events, concluding time itself might work differently in dreams—a theory that didn’t find mainstream acceptance.

Déjà-rêvé (Already Dreamed)

While déjà vu is the feeling you’ve lived a moment before, déjà-rêvé is the sense you’ve dreamed it before. Some studies suggest up to 20% of déjà vu experiences may actually be déjà-rêvé (Brown, 2004).

Medical research has documented déjà-rêvé during electrical brain stimulation of the temporal lobe—patients vividly recalled specific dreams while awake, suggesting a neurological link (Curot et al., 2018).

This is another thing I've had experiences of, but didn't realise had a different name to déjà vu - I won't bore you with details, but myself and a friend can certainly pinpoint specific dreams which have played out later on, or have a very clear memory of the dream we had in full which resembles the moment we're living... Weird, right?

What Do We Do With Our Dreams?

Dreams can:

• Affect your mood for hours after waking

• Inspire creativity (McCartney’s Yesterday, Shelley’s Frankenstein)

• Help process emotions (Hartmann, 2010)

Keeping a dream journal can help make sense of recurring patterns.
Here’s how to do it well:

1. Keep it close – Have a notebook or phone notes app by your bed. Record immediately upon waking.

2. Note feelings first – Even if the plot is patchy, the emotional tone is key.

3. Record fragments – People, colours, words, sensations—write them all down.

4. Add waking context – Note stressors, milestones, or unusual events from the day before.

5. Review regularly – Every couple of weeks, look back for repeating themes or imagery.

6. Don’t over-analyse in the moment – Let patterns emerge naturally over time.

Plainly put, dreams are worth noticing, but not worth surrendering all your decision-making power to (Watt et al., 2014).

Happy Citta Reflection

Dreams are part of being human. Sometimes nonsensical, sometimes transformative. Whether yours feel like warnings, reassurances, or just mental fireworks, the most valuable takeaway might be the emotion they leave behind.

If a dream stirs you to reach out to someone, change a habit, or simply pause and reflect, perhaps that’s its gift. Allow it, but don't give your whole life to it.

Your turn: Have you had a dream — predictive, déjà-rêvé, a vivid waking confusion, or a visitation — that changed how you acted in waking life? Let me know in the comments below!