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"We have a dream that shows 75 to 100 people, and to provide good, but individual psychological portrait,” he said Domhoff Bill, a psychologist and professional home, a system to quantify, and the division of the contents of a dream the past few decades has been used for research around the world. "We dream of 1000 to give the collection a few years, you can file a psychological nature and almost the exact same fingerprint."             The Science of Dreams     When your body is safely at rest and your brain therefore no longer needs to process information from the outside world, it is free to focus on other crucial tasks, including integrating new experiences into memory. What happens during this offline processing in turn helps guide your waking behavior.   It has also become clear that dream content can provide valuable information about our deepest preoccupations and feelings. "We have shown that 75 to 100 dreams from a person give us a very good psychological portrait of that individual," says Bill Domhoff, a psychologist and an expert on a system for quantifying and categorizing dream content that has been used for decades by researchers around the world. "Give us 1,000 dreams collected over a couple of decades and we can give you a psychological profile that is almost as individualized and accurate as fingerprinting." While some researchers insist that dreaming has no purpose, others argue that the dreaming process itself plays a role in regulating our moods.   If our brains are functioning normally, we do indeed dream each night, even though we recall only a fraction of those internal dramas. Researchers have devised simple methods that can help improve dream recall so that we can peer through this unique window on the mind more frequently. Scientists have also demonstrated that we can increase our ability to become aware that we're dreaming while a dream is still in progress and sometimes even deliberately control what happens next in the action—a remarkable phenomenon known as lucid dreaming.   During REM sleep, when the majority of dreaming occurs, the brain chemicals that are circulating in abundance are different from those that prevail during waking, as are the regions of the brain that are most active. This dramatically altered operating environment can allow us to make out-of-the-box mental connections that would be rejected by the logical information-processing centers of the brain in command during waking life. The free-form associations that give dreams their sometimes nonsensical quality may also explain why many artists and scientists claim to have come up with breakthrough concepts in dreams.           — Andrea Rock, The Mind at Night – The New Science of How and Why We Dream               Indexes/01