Sound familiar? It is a proven fact that every human dreams. Whether they remember the dreams or not; everyone has experienced another reality in the form of a dream.

Everyone also has more than one dream a night. According to www.dreammoods.com, people dream for one or two hours every night. In that couple of hours, a person can have up to seven different dreams.

What people may not know is why they dream. Even psychologists are unsure. They have argued over it for centuries by forming many different theories and constantly revising them as more research is done.

Some dream theories include the beliefs that dreams are images of past experiences, dreams are the expression of repressed thoughts and feelings or dreams are programmed into us as part of our human existence.

“I think you dream subconsciously what you’re worried about or something that happened in your day. I dream about who I was last with or what happened last,” said Mari Hydrick, a senior from Lake Tahoe, Calif.

Dreams can also be influenced by outside factors. For example, the media can be incorporated into dreams.

“Sometimes I think dreams come from … shows you watch,” said Crystal Henkel, a senior from Las Vegas, Nev. “I’ve been watching the TV show 24 a lot lately so I’ve been having action-packed dreams like I’m Jack Bauer.”

However, not all dreams have to do with the present or fiction from the media. Sometimes dreams may be completely random to the dreamer.

Dreams “are simply not the same as experiences when an individual is awake. Rather, the dream experience is not coherent, has no logical order, and contains vivid yet unrecognizable people, places and situations,” according to “A Behavioral Analysis of Dreaming,” an article printed in Psychological Record.

“Sometimes I dream about things and I have no clue where they came from,” Henkel said.

Many people believe that dreams can be interpreted, explained and applied to real life.

Hydrick is engaged and recently had a dream that she was with her fiancé in New York City to get married and her aunt was busy with all the preparations, but she wasn’t getting married for another month in her dream.

“I guess you could read into that. I was going to move to New York City after I graduated and Matt and I are postponing the wedding. So that’s probably why I dreamed about that,” Hydrick said.

In order to interpret dreams, the person must first be able to remember the dream. There are many ideas on how to do this such as keep a dream journal, tell someone about it or focus on remembering a dream even before falling asleep. But even those may not be effective if the dreamer cannot express in words what the dream was about.

“If I want to remember a dream I’ll tell my husband, but I can never remember them exactly the way they were. They’re hard to explain,” Henkel said.