Reply to comment

I don't know if agree with the idea that dreams are processing of information that we encountered during the day, because I have definitely had many dreams that have been completely unrelated to anything that happened to me that day or even that week. I would like to think that dreams are more an expression of the unconscious rather than the brain processing information. It could be the unconscious' reaction to the information of the day or maybe not. I just feel that information processing is a very small part of what happens in the unconscious mind. I could be really off base though since this supposition is really my desire for reality rather than the actual thing.

All of this discussion of the unconcious lead me to a contemplation of some of the dream study that I have been doing this year in my archeology and classics classes. In the ancient world dreams were considered to be a message from the gods to give aide or send retribution. They were significant and unassociated with mere information processing. In many cases dreams were supposed to lead a person to a cure of a terrible ailment that they may be suffering. I just think that it is interesting that we have such different associations with dreams now but they are still no less mysterious in origin.