I am running through a field of flowers. I see a butterfly and I follow it. When it stops, there is a rainbow in front of us. A unicorn helps us get over it, and then we find a pot of gold. “Joanne wake up its morning did you heard the alarm?’’ Aw, I wish that was not just a dream.

Have you ever asked yourself Why do I dream? Are dreams real, or do they make sense? Dreams can be fascinating, exciting, terrifying or just plain weird. I think sometimes dreams do make sense and they are real. Dreaming is usually caused by images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that go through our mind while we are sleeping. Men do it. Women do it. Even babies do it. We all dream, even those of us who claim not to. In fact, I have researched and have found that people usually have several dreams each night, each one lasting for between 5 to 20 minutes. During a typical lifetime, people spend an average of six years dreaming! I think dreams are made up of the actual images, thoughts and content contained within our minds. Sometimes, dreams are the events that have happened in someone’s life or possibly will happen. For example if you were going to have a school exam, you would probably be having a dream about doing exams in the class, answering all the questions correct because you studied them well and you passing it. This shows how well you were prepared for the exams; it can be vise versa if you are not well prepared and you are worried before sleeping.

What is really cool about dreams is when you are sleeping and dreaming knowing that you are dreaming. This is called a lucid dream. During this type of dream, you can often “direct” or control the content of the dream. Approximately half of all people can remember experiencing at least one instance of lucid dreaming, and some individuals are able to have lucid dreams quite frequently. For example, say you dream that you are a super hero. You may travel from Toronto to British Columbia by simply saying the word of “blueberry”, and you know it is not real because you are in bed.

Now, you can’t talk about dreaming without bringing up nightmares. I am very sorry to those who don’t like to hear this word like me. So let’s just use the word “bad dreams” for today. Bad dreams can cause terror in children and adults. In some cases, the same scene occurs over and over, never giving the dreamer any relief or a chance to rest. Bad dreams are mostly caused if you watched a scary movie or read something sad. This probably sounds really funny, but if you were to watch a scary movie, I suggest you should watch it during the day time so the scary effects might wear off when you go to bed.

There are different ways of dealing with nightmares when they are occurring. It is important for the individual to become aware of the fact that they are dreaming. If the person can calm themselves down enough, they can become aware of the fact that they are dreaming quicker. At this point, if they are religious, they can pray to God for guidance. If not, they can think of pleasant, peaceful thoughts.

Have you ever heard the saying Men are from Mars and women are from Venus? Well, that might not be true, but what is true is that men mostly dream about action and mostly have only men in their dreams. Whereby, women dream about daily lifestyles and have an equal amount of men and women.

The one thing that is very disappointing about dreams is you can forget it so easily. Usually, a person forgets their dreams in five minutes. So if you just had an awesome dream, you should write it down and maybe you could write a story about it. Something really natural about dreaming is if you are snoring; that means you aren’t dreaming.

So dreams can be many things for us. They are gifts from the universe. We can go through life ignoring them, or we can use them, pay attention to them, take advantage of them and learn from them.

Dreams help us to use your imagination while we are sleeping. And using your imagination is always fun especially when we are dreaming good dreams.

Joanne K.