To answer this age-old question we need to lay ourselves down on the big comfy couch in Dr Freud’s office…


The father of dreams, Sigmund Freud's theories were based on the idea of repressed longing - meaning that we dream the desires we’re not allowed to express in everyday life because they’re unacceptable to our teachers, parents and friends. He believed we enacted our sexual fantasies and that dream objects all had sexual connotations (Living in the repressive Victorian era where nothing was allowed probably had something to do with this theory!)

Carl Jung came next with his theory that we dream to solve our problems and sort out our issues.

More recently Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley presented the idea that dreams were simply the result of random electrical brain impulses that pull imagery from traces of experience stored in the memory. After we wake up our brain simply creates a story to tie the images in order to make sense of the experience.