A dream is like a film which is seen unexpectedly. Every time we fall asleep we are given a ticket to such a cinema, but we do not even know the title of today's dream. Strange situations, famous people or nasty dragons can appear in every dream: everything may happen in this peculiar state of mind. Such a phenomenon, a dream, may be very interesting or even significant for different people: first of all for the dreamer, that is for the participant or just the witness of the dream; next for psychologists, for whom a dream can serve as a mirror of a person's psyche; and finally for scientists who are faced with the very difficult task of stating what a dream really is.

Dreams constitute a significant part of human life, if only because of the fact that they take up usually one third of our lives. This is a time for unknown adventures and unpredictable events under unexplained circumstances, a time to speak to people we admire and whom, most probably, we would never meet in the real world. Every limitation created by our consciousness or by sheer physical disability can totally disappear. People fly, penetrate through walls, erect infinitely huge buildings. They rule, give orders, they are listened to and respected. They are prettier and richer, or they even turn into somebody else. At last they are happy and carefree. This is why some people call dreams a better world; they compare them to a serenely happy childhood and very often long for them. Besides, every person is the owner and sole witness of such a world. One can be sure that the pictures of one's dream do not exist in anyone else's head. This kind of monopoly makes people associate so closely with their dreams, and perhaps this is why dreams are so important for them.

The significance of dreams can also be a subject of interest for psychologists. They treat them as a group of related thoughts, images or feelings experienced when the mind is not completely under conscious control. The psychologists' premise is that what we experience while sleeping is the reflection of what we meet in our consciousness, and thus analysing dreams could provide some important information about someone's general emotional state. It is usually the case that an accumulation of events or even a sheer increase in the mind's activity during the day makes a rest more exhausting so that tiring things are dreamt about. Stress in everyday life may turn our dreams into nightmares; temporary or permanent fear often creates appalling pictures in our dreams, from which we wake up shouting; a pessimistic outlook upon life always gives our dreams a somehow tragic quality. Thus a proper evaluation of the emotional colouring of dreams could be a helpful factor in evaluating the whole psychic sphere of a person.

Finally, the nature and meaning of dreams are significant problems for scientists. Dreams remain one of the great unsolved mysteries. The first thing that needs to be considered is the very interpretation of the nature of dreams, that is whether they are only a reflection of what is actually happening in the human mind, or whether they involve some special work of the mind which is not present during pure conscious thinking; whether it is the night's equivalent of reverie, which is the free association of ideas, or quite a new kind of thinking in which the unconscious world of dreams enables a person to feel, see or even foresee more than in reality. Is it only the imagination of a mind based on a person's life experiences that causes odd pictures to follow one another? It is still a mystery why certain dreams turn out to foretell events that later take place in the real world. Various dream-books have been written and a great number of people reach for them every morning. It is believed that weddings and teeth in a dream herald death, worries mean joy, while hope means hopelessness. It would be very interesting to know whether we dream about something that is simply likely to happen or whether our mind has some unexamined quality thanks to which it is able to recall events that happen either in the past or in the future. Everyone, at least several times in his life, has the impression that the situation in which he is being involved has already happened. For some seconds we are sure we know what is going to be said and done; we almost feel as though we are sleeping and after a while we experience the feeling that it must have been a dream when we felt and acted that way. Perhaps the feeling is only a pure illusion, but it might appear to be quite a new phenomenon worth examining. The knowledge of fortuitousness or non-fortuitousness of dreams could be very important for a human-being.

Whatever our dreams are, they are significant for us as an inseparable part of our lives, and, like events in reality, they also cast a shadow over our conscious way of thinking and acting. It very often happens that we are in a good, melancholic or blue mood through the whole morning depending on what the subject of our dream was. Sometimes a certain dream can influence or even change someone's whole life if that person believes in the prophetic power of dreams. We do not know who is the real creator of our dreams: we ourselves and our experiences, or some power that is beyond our control, and yet we are the sole owner of them all. Perhaps they are our private alternative to the real world.

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