Sigmund Freud maintained dreams were "the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind." Carl Gustav Jung described the "collective subconscious" as the nucleus of one's soul. It had been said, "Dreams tell of much needed truth that we feel in real life. Dreams are like onions. You peel it down until you can get to the core – yourself."
"Each dream sequence doesn’t last as long as most people think," one psychologist explained. "Dreams don’t happen in a matter of seconds, but they don’t go on all night, either. I’d guess most dreams last 10 to 15 minutes each." Another added, "We spend 15 to 25% of our sleeping time in dreams. Why shouldn't they be pleasant? Our culture has a funny attitude toward dreams. It’s a slice of experience we ignore. But in almost all of human history, cultures have valued their dreams and assigned various meanings to them." One psychoanalyst pointed out, "The only person who can interpret a dream accurately is the dreamer. I can help a dreamer decide what the dream means, but I can’t just hear a dream and figure it out. Our dreams have an internal integrity, and sometimes they don’t make sense because we don’t understand them."
It was thought during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep humans had the most dreams and the dreams were known to be the most revealing, "Mozart, Schumann and Saint-Saens claimed they first heard some of their music in dreams. Writers Goethe, Blake, Cowper, Poe, Voltaire, Dante, Shelly, Heine, Tolstoy and Coleridge also used dream material in their poetry and prose."
It was suggested, "In most of our dreams our inner eye of reflection is shut and we sleep within our sleep." However "the exception takes place when we seem to awake within our dreams, without disturbing or ending the dream state, and learn to recognize that we are dreaming while the dream is still happening."
In conclusion, "It is hard to believe that we spend almost a third of our lives in a behavioural state that has no function at all (meaning sleeping). If sleep does not serve an absolutely vital function (implying a lot of important things are going on there), then it is the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made."
