Well, just been reading up on dreams and what they are believed to be about, here are some references and indications of what they are believed to be about:

Activation-synthesis theory - Hobson & McCarley (1977)
Random bursts of neural activity are made sense of by the brain, this synthesis is expressed in a dream.

Reverse learning theory - Crick & Mitchison (1983)
Dreaming allows unwanted or irrelevant information to be deleted. This means that the brain does not fill up with unimportant content.

Problem-solving theory - Webb & Cartwright (1978).
Dreams allow people to deal with their problems and come up with solutions.

Wish fulfilment theory - Freud (1900)
Part of his psychodynamic approach. Dream’s manifest contentuses symbols to hide the anxiety-causing latent content - a person’s unconscious desires.


Well, I don't absolutely agree with any of those theories, my theory has always been that the subconscious is like a hard disk drive with a low level resolution and capable of limited informational analysis (It’s our animal mind). It deals in shapes, images and situations. It throws up connected content to the conscious where it is refined and given greater clarity (pattern forming and provides basic relational inferences). Sleep switches off the conscious but does not switch off the subconscious (Basically it’s like in hibernate mode on your computer) critical systems are maintained. Anyway, as we rise out of the subconscious state into consciousness we see what we are departing... the subconscious in action. A swirling pool of content... connecting in various ways to the point of illogical imagery.. Just as our dreams often are. Nb: The subconscious never switches off, and this processing is going on all the time, the conscious stimulus mainly overrides it during awakening hours (E.g. When you have a Eureka during the day this is the subconscious eventually solving a problem and the jigsaw fits with it being pushed up into the conscious). The actual impressions of imagery are being sifted all the time with the less important ones fading at a greater rate (like opaque images slowly fading away). That is why you can dream events and situations long after the fact if they were assigned a high level of importance.

Nb: In Jungs patient in the "origin of the wind" its almost as though he is living in his subconscious (dream state), the low level processing of imagery. The inability of the conscious to refine those illogical but logical intuitive understandings. Here's the video.. Its about at 5.00minutes into the video till 6.10mins. YouTube - Face to face with Carl Jung - Part 3 of 4