"Drink up, dreamers - You're running dry." - Peter Gabriel, "Here Comes The Flood"

With apologies to the late, great Gene Roddenberry, space is not the final frontier. The final frontier is our own dreams. We have been able to play golf on the moon, and yet dreams are just as mysterious today as they were for our earliest ancestors. There have been many guesses as to why we dream, but in the end, it is up to the individual dreamer to answer the question for themselves.

Dreams were thought to be everything from Divine messages to brain core dumps of our daily activities. Scientists Francis Crick (yes - the DNA guy) and Graeme Mitchinson theorized that "we dream to forget". But one thing is clear - dreaming is vital to our species. We can dream and not be asleep. There is very little difference between daydreaming and night dreaming. And, if we are deprived of sleep for a few days, we will hallucinate incredibly vividly, because our brains need to dream.

Every human being dreams, whether we choose to remember them or not. Not everyone has to pay close attention to their dreams. If the thought of dream analysis bores you, then dream analysis is not for you. But dreams to strongly communicate to many people, this writer being one of them.

I would be very rash to say I knew why we dream, as I am neither a scientist nor a neurologist, but am just a dreamer. My first memory is of a nightmare I had when I was still in the crib. In over thirty years of dreams when sleeping and pursuing dream literature and theories while awake, I have come to some conclusions.

We dream for many reasons, and our brain employs all of these reasons when it sees fit. Not all dreams are alike.

First off, we dream to help us figure things out. We try to make some sort of sense of the senselessness of our lives. The act of dreaming helps us sort out our vast store of memories. Dreams can also help us figure out decisions, having us glimpse the results of all of our options. Sometimes the only thing we really need to figure out is who we are, which is a task to keep us busy for a lifetime, at least.

Also, our bodies speak to us thorough our dreams. You can have dreams revealing that you are beginning a sickness, or a cause of a sickness will be revealed and sometimes a cure, too. The ancient Greeks had dream hospitals where those who were ill slept in order to get a healing dream from the God Asclepius. In a less dramatic way, I dream of getting

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