You're talking to your friend, when suddenly your feet start to float off the ground. Soon you're flying over your neighborhood, looking down on the houses! When you land, you're in math class, and everyone is taking a quiz. You haven't studied, and to make things worse, you're wearing a clown outfit! A typical day of life? Nope. It's more like a typical night of dreaming.

From the beginning of time, people have had many puzzling questions about dreams:

• What are dreams, and why do we have them?
• What, if anything, do dreams mean?
• Are dreams important to our lives in some way?
• Can they unlock secrets about our personalities, or predict the future?
• Why are some dreams so freaky WEIRD?

Even though modern science has figured out a lot of big mysteries, we're still guessing at these. Every expert has a different theory, and these theories change as new information and ideas become available.

Our thanks to Alan Siegel Ph.D., author of Dream Wisdom: Uncovering Life's Answers in Your Dreams, and a past President of the Association for the Study of Dreams, for his contribution to this topic.

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