Dreams can be viewed as the most primal form of creativity. Almost everyone dreams and each person dreams are unique. We can’t experience each other’s dream and we only tell our dream to the closest people. But from what we hear we can conclude that everyone’s reality is totally different while dreaming.
The connections within dream emerge subconsciously and defy everyday waking logic. In reality events of our life provoke our emotions, but in a dream it’s wise-versa. If you feel anxious about going to bed, chances are your subconscious will craft a scenario for you to live through your anxiety; if you want some water, but you are too tired to wake and get it, you can spend what feels like hours in a dream searching for water. But beyond that there are also more strange, vague sensations that appear in a dream, sometimes you wake up with a strong feeling from it and you can neither shake nor describe it.
Space and time also work different within a dream. We know that dream just last several minutes, but it can feel like the whole night. We also can teleport within a dream and we can return to places from the past dreams even if they don’t have any real prototype. People in a dream are also vague — when we wake up, we can merge a character from the dream with a certain person in our life, but sometimes it’s just our interpretation because some traits of the character or our feeling towards her/him is similar.
There are many different theories about the function of the dream. One is that dreams are just response to random feelings in the body during sleeping. Another is that in dreams we can safely practice different scenarios and model what will happen if we behave certain ways. Yet another theory says that dreams are just our way to get what we can’t get in reality. Whichever theory is true, I am happy evolution came up with this all-night entertainment system :)