Dreams are something that everyone is familiar with. A dream is a mental activity that occurs while we are sleeping, and everyone has experienced one at some point in their lives.
People can dream at any time during their sleep, but they occur most often during REM sleep. REM sleep is rapid eye movement sleep, and it's the moment in the sleep cycle when our brains are most active. Some may think that they don’t dream, but that is not the case. Everyone dreams, but a lot of the time we just don’t remember what happened during them.
According to a Cleveland Clinic article, "[w]hen you’re experiencing more stress or anxiety, you tend to dream more, too. The types of dreams you have also change." With this information, it is safe to assume that our dreams can show us things about ourselves that we don’t know. For example, a person may be overworking themselves and dealing with a lot of stress without realizing it until they go to sleep one night and have a nightmare. A lot of the time, dreams aren’t just random activities that go on in our brains while we sleep. Most dreams actually have deeper meanings and can help us learn a lot about ourselves.
In the past, people had other ideas about dreams and what they were. In a Time article, it’s revealed that "the ancient Egyptians thought of dreams as simply a different form of seeing, with trained dreamers serving as seers to help plan battles and make state decisions." and "[t]he ancient Greeks and Romans believed that dreams were equal parts predictions of future events and visitations by the dead." The idea of dreams being predictions is not unfamiliar. Many have experienced dreams where they see or do certain things, and then those same things happen in real life. Obviously, this could just be a coincidence, but it is hard to say since it is not the easiest thing to study dreams.
Even with modern technology, it’s not like we can hook someone up to a machine and see what they see when they dream. It’s not easy to study dreams, so it's difficult to be certain when it comes to things like predictions in dreams. We basically have to believe someone’s word if they say something like they predicted the future in their dream, and normally when someone does claim something like that, they are ridiculed and called crazy. It is unfortunate because if everyone thinks that a person is crazy if they predict something in their dream, then if something like that really happens, nobody will believe them. At the end of the day, it all just depends on personal opinion. Some may believe that predictions in dreams are real, while others believe that dreams only depend on our emotions and what’s going on in our real lives.
Personally, I believe that both sides are correct; dreams can predict the future, but they can also just be based on emotions. The great thing about dreams is that, most of the time, they are unique to each person. People occasionally have similar dreams because they are experiencing the same emotions or thinking about the same things, but they always have something unique about them. Hopefully in the future, we can find more ways to study dreams and eventually get some answers.