Question: How are you able to interpret dreams if they are a creation of the unconscious mind and are often forgotten, once the person is awake?

Jack barton answered on 14 Jun 2017:

My work doesn’t involve a lot of dream interpretation but those who do study dreams typically ask participants to report upon waking up what they were dreaming about. This can be done naturally through a dream diary which participant might keep over a week or longer. The problem is that many of the dreams might be simply forgotten or inaccessible because they occurred during a earlier point in the night.

To deal with this, you can instead see how people’s dreams alter over a night’s sleep by waking them up throughout the night. If you wake people up during a stage of sleep known as rapid eye movement (REM) and ask them to report what they were dreaming about they will usually report vivid dreams which vary depending on the individual (e.g. some people seem to report very rich dreams and others very basic).

Early studies in the 1950s employed just this method to show that dreams, at least rich and vivid ones, tend to occur during REM sleep as opposed to other stages of sleep. They identified when participants were in REM sleep by tracking their brain waves using something called polysomnography (PSG) which tracks, amongst other things, brain activity and eye movements. Upon identifying that participants were in the correct stage of sleep they would wake them up with a sound or by shaking them awake.

In terms of what creates dreams, or why we dream, this is less certain although there are many different theories. Some more bizarre than others!