Over a seventy-year life span, you will spend at least fifty thousand hours to dreaming (Segell 42). What you dream about can be very different from one individual to another and from one dream to another in the same individual. Many things affect what we dream about and the theories about why we dream vary. Scientists believe that dreaming is a natural process of the brain. On the other hand, Psychologists believe that our dreams are secretive emotions. Both sides have been spending years researching dreams and yet we are still baffled.
             Before we can even consider where dreams come form or what causes them you must first understand the steps and stages to sleep. In order for a person to dream they must be in a period of rest which they lose awareness of their surroundings, that which is sleep. Once a person has fallen asleep, they will enter into the first of five stages of sleep. Stages one through four are usually termed as non-REM (rapid eye movement) sleep with stages three and four also being referred to as delta sleep, due to evidence of low frequency brain waves. It is said that non-REM sleep makes up about 80% of sleep and REM sleep makes up the remaining 20%. Stage one lasts around seven minutes. This stage is a time when the brain produces alpha waves as we are going from being awake to sleep (Lowe 83). Stages two through four are periods in which the dreamer falls deeper and deeper into sleep. Declining during this time are the dreamer's muscle tension, heart rate, respiration, and body temperature. Stage four is the deepest stage of sleep and is where sleepwalking and night terror occur in children. Neither of these occurrences is remembered. The fifth stage is the REM sleep and this occurs approximately an hour and a half from the time you fall asleep. The REM stage is also referred to as Paradoxical Sleep because the body is in a state of physiological arousal. In this stage, the brain is highly...