Still with me? OK, so every day, your mind picks up loads of information about life and your position in it. When you go to sleep, your brain goes into clerical mode. It sifts through every second of the day's record and files it all away. Remember the three levels of consciousness? Well here is where they begin to make more sense; things you need at a moment's notice will be filed in Forward-conscious, things you might need to recall at some point will be put a bit deeper, in Back-conscious, and the rest (all of it) will then be shovelled into Sub-conscious, getting it out of there takes a lot of effort, like hypnosis.
Added to this filng process, there is a comparison of records going on with previously filed memory and some things that were once considered not worth much at the time, may well become far more important and now be stored somewhere more accessable. In order to do this, the brain runs a whole load of little role-plays to see what fits where and it is this process that becomes a dream. It also explains why, after a night's sleep, something or somebody you had long "forgotten", is suddenly in the front of your mind. To be accurate, you never forget anything, your brain just files it away somewhere obscure.
Because you also have a more EMPATHIC nature when asleep, you may also pick up thought patterns from outside your imediate environment. As I said before, time tends to get a bit lost in this and it is quite possible that a mind can pick up all manner of other people's thoughts, calculate what their plans are, what the results of their decisions might be and then place the complete scenario in memory.
If all those people do as they intended, the scenario will very probably happen very much like the "memory"
Then there are dreams like some get that actually give real images, particularly of disasters. Here I would refer you to that "collective conscious". What happens there is way beyond finite boundaries and does not have a complete explanation that will fit here. In very simple terms, the "collective conscious" is not in any prticular material form, hence it is not bound by the confines of time, space or anything relative to matter. It is therefore quite possible to perceive things that are long since past or yet to come. The one thing I have found about all such dreams is that no amount of effort will alter the outcome because they are a vision of the result of all influencial decisions taken by everybody. As such they tend to be borne as more of a curse by those who experience them.
If you have problems with such dreams, Email me for more specific advice.
Dreams are the brain working at it's fullest potential, day dreaming will knock out your perceptions of the real world, I know because I tend to do it! But they are essential to all of us, whether you remember them or not!