What are dreams made of and are they important? Questions like this are still the subject of scientific research long after the ancient Sumerians began interpreting dreams as portents of the future some 5000 years BCE (Black and Green, 1992).

One answer to the question about what dreams are made of is relatively straightforward. I like the definition offered by Meaidi, Jennum, Ptito and Kupers (2014) who said “Dreams are a state of consciousness caused by self-generated sensory, cognitive, and affective processes” (pg. 592). “Self-generated” means that these experiences are produced from within the brain itself, rather than being the end result of a message sent to the brain for interpretation from the world outside of us. I would add that dreams represent an altered state of consciousness. When we’re asleep, we’re not connected to and responding to signals from the outside world, or at least not in the usual way.

All of our senses are represented in dreams. Dreams almost always contain visual information, and about 40 to 60% of dreams feature sound. Touch is less frequently experienced in dreams (about 15-30% of dreams), and rarer still (less than 1% of the time) are dreams featuring olfactory or taste sensations (Zadra, Nielsen and Donderi, 1998).

Given the prominent role sensory experiences play in dreams, scientists wondered if the amount of experience with a particular sensory system the dreamer had might influence the role that senses have in dreams. For example, do the dreams of musicians feature music more often than do the dreams of non-musicians? Uga,........

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