What do Dreams Mean?

This is an interesting question. Do dreams really mean anything? Sigmund Freud was one of the first to tackle this problem. He suggested they were repressed longings, or desires that we weren't able to carry out in our real life, and as you might expect, most of his interpretations centered on sexual desires and symbolism, and needless to say they were controversial. Carl Jung, who studied under Freud, broke away from his teachers ideas and decided that dreams were merely a reflection of our waking life, and attempts to solve the problems in it.
These ideas were taken seriously until the early 1970's when Allan Hobson and Robert McCarthy suggested that dreams were the result of random electrical impulses that created images from experiences stored in our memory. It was well known at the time that when certain areas of the brain were probed, the person "saw" stored images. Hobson and McCarthy believed that something similar was going on in the case of dreams. But it was known that when we are probed we see only singular images.  Hobson and McCarthy believed that our minds, in trying to make sense of these images, connected them into a story. The idea created a lot of interest, but it was controversial, and still is. Scientists are still not sure why we dream and what they mean. Sleep expert William Dement of Stanford University feels that they do have meaning, and it is likely related to things our conscious mind represses. He writes "dreams may hold profound implications not just about ourselves, but about the nature of consciousness and the deepest working of the human mind."
Many of today's scientists believe that they are nothing more than probed memories. Nevertheless, there are indications that dreams help people deal with their emotional problems