Dreamology

Freud suggested that bad dreams let the brain learn to gain control over emotions resulting from distressing experiences.

12] Jung suggested that dreams may compensate for one-sided attitudes held in waking consciousness.[15] Ferenczi[16] proposed that the dream, when told, may communicate something that is not being said outright. Dreams are like the cleaning-up operations of computers when they are off-line, removing parasitic nodes and other "junk" from the mind during sleep.[17]

[18] Dreams create new ideas through the generation of random thought mutations. Some of these may be rejected by the mind as useless, while others may be seen as valuable and retained. Blechner[19] calls this the theory of "Oneiric Darwinism." Dreams regulate mood.[20]

Hartmann[21] says dreams may function like psychotherapy, by "making connections in a safe place" and allowing the dreamer to integrate thoughts that may be dissociated during waking life. More recent research by Griffin has led to the formulation of the 'expectation fulfillment theory of dreaming', which suggests that dreaming metaphorically completes patterns of emotional expectation and lowers stress levels.[22][23] Coutts[24] hypothesizes that dreams modify and test mental schemas during sleep during a process he calls emotional selection, and that only schema modifications that appear emotionally adaptive during dream tests are selected for retention, while those that appear maladaptive are abandoned or further modified and tested.

Dream is a product of "dissociated imagination", which is dissociated from conscious self and draws material from sensory memory for simulation, with sensory feedback resulting in hallucination. By simulating the sensory signals to drive the autonomous nerves, dream can effect mind-body interaction. In the brain and spine, the autonomous "repair nerves", which can expand the blood vessels, connect with pain and compression nerves, and are grouped into many chains called meridians by the Chinese.

Dream also exploits the chain-reacting meridians to repair body by sending out very intensive movement-compression signals when the level of growth enzyme goes high. [25]