In Your Dreams

Some dreams you don't want to wake up from - sex with Javier Bardem; some are downright nasty - sex with Mickey Rourke. In a funeral home. So why do we dream?

Researchers agree that dreaming is the brain's way of pruning information - sifting through the day's experiences and filing important stuff away as memories. "There's evidence to suggest the brain plays those experiences over and over in your dreams to set the memory pathways," says Dr Cameron van den Heuvel, senior sleep researcher at the University of South Australia. "It could be images, motions, tastes, sounds." Dreams may also be responsible for making sense of emotions. "When the brain can't make sense of something, it dreams about it," says WH stress less expert, psychologist Dr Suzy Green. "We know that with post-traumatic stress disorder, patients have nightmares that relive the trauma. When something traumatic happens, the belief system in our brain goes 'What the?' So the processing of that event happens in REM sleep."

While dreams can unlock feelings, they don't necessarily reveal "the truth", says Dr Delwyn Bartlett, psychologist and sleep researcher at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research in Sydney: "You're more likely to remember the strong emotions that go with it, but not the minutia of the content." There could also be a disconnect between the content of the dream and the emotion. "I ask patients how a dream made them feel, and that can lead us to another area of their life that's causing the emotion." So if you dream about your partner cheating on you, it doesn't mean he will. It means you could be anxious, but not necessarily about him. Got it?

A recent study by the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley in the US also suggests dreaming could help you get along with others. In a study, 36 volunteers were asked to interpret facial expressions of people in photos after a 60- or 90-minute nap or after no nap. Subjects who'd reached REM sleep were better at identifying positive emotions in people's faces compared with those who didn't achieve REM or who didn't sleep at all.

According to Bartlett, you can also train yourself to "lucid dream". "It's a form of meditation where you can go back into a dream and change the outcome," she says. Choose-your-own-adventure dreams? We like that.

Bringing meaning

Some common dream interpretations
Sex with a relative It doesn't mean you're into incest, says dream coach Leon Nacson. It's usually born from a desire to reconnect with a family member.

Falling Sigmund Freud thought this dream was sexual; that it describes giving in to sexual desire. Well, you do get that same belly flip feeling.

Being chased You're avoiding someone you need to face up to, says Jane Teresa Anderson, author of 101 Dream Interpretation Tips ($29.95, dream.net.au).

Public nudity 'Fess up, we've all had one: "It shows a need to reveal your true colours and let people see who you really are," says Nacson.