What do people tend to dream about, and what theories have been proposed to explain why people dream at all?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Above all, dreams tend to be personal. They generally involve people we know in settings that are familiar to us. We are particularly likely to dream about current worries, conflicts, and stressors. There is no universally agreed upon explanation for why we dream. Freud proposed that dreams are a form of "wishful thinking" in which we have the opportunity to gratify impulses that have gone unfulfilled in our waking lives. Other theorists take a more cognitive view, proposing that dreams provide an opportunity to engage in creative problem-solving. Both of these views mesh nicely with available data regarding the typical content of dreams. A very different view is the activation-synthesis model of dreaming, which proposes that dreams are simply byproducts of neural activation during REM sleep. In this view, the content of dreams is almost incidental. Whereas the wish-fulfillment and problem-solving theories both regard the "wide awake" brain as the effect of dreaming, the activation-synthesis model views the "wide awake" brain as the cause of dreaming.