Why do people dream? Dreams occur to maintain our mental and emotional balance (Parker & Parker, 1985, p. 41). Dreaming can help an individual understand an emotional imbalance if they try to find its meaning. Some studies suggest that dreaming is a way to archive and sort memories. Short-term memory would be overloaded if unimportant or insignificant thoughts were not transmitted elsewhere. Even unnoticed things from the day are archived and then, quite unexpectedly, are brought back into the dream. Dreams are a very stimulating experience, and those experiences are what help develop and strengthen the neural pathways in the brain. Dreams help make sense of neural static by triggering neural activity that evokes random visual memories, which the sleeping brain weaves into stories to make sense of the activity. Dreams reflect cognitive development, whereby the content reflects the dreamer's cognitive development, knowledge, and understanding (Myers 2014). Traditional Theories of Dreams The fascination with dreams since the beginning of time has produced many theories about the meaning of dreams. Since before Christ, the ancients “considered the dream not as a product of the dreaming psyche, but as an inspiration from the realm of the divine… they distinguished precious and truthful dreams, sent to the sleeper to warn him or announce the future to him, from dreams vain, deceitful and idle, destined to lead him astray or throw him into ruin” (Freud, 1999, p. 8). Sigmund Freud, considered the father of psychology, is perhaps the most famous dream theorist with his work in The Interpretation of Dreams. He believed that the dream was a disguised expression of the dreamer's desires and that these desires were almost always sexual. He bel...... middle of paper......1286-1289.Parker, D., & Parker, J. (1985). The complete book of dreams. New York, NY: Harmony Books. Schlachter, G. A. (1998). Current topics: the interpretation of Freud's dream and the reference interview. Reference and User Services Quarterly, 269-272.Schredl, M., & Erlacher, D. (2008). Relationship between waking sports activities, reading and dream content in sports students and psychology students. The Journal of Psychology, 267-275. Sigmund Freud, T. b. (1999). The interpretation of dreams. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press. Stickgold, R., Hobson, J., Fosse, R., & Fosse, M. (2001). Sleep, learning and dreams: offline memory processing. Science, 1052-1057. van den Daele, L. (1996). Direct interpretation of dreams: neuropsychology. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 253-268.Yu, C.K.-C. (2012). The effect of sleep position on dream experience. Dreaming, 212-221.