Introduction

What are dreams exactly? What purpose do they serve, and why are they often so bizarre? Is this just the brain trying to make sense of random neural firing? Or is there some evolutionary reason for dreaming? Dreams are inherently hard to study. Even with all the advances in science and technology, we still haven't really found a way to record what some one else is dreaming about. And it's easy to forget our dreams as soon as we wake up, unless we're really careful to write them down. But even with all these difficulties, little by little, dream researchers are making progress in figuring out how we dream and why we dream.