Dreams...Weird, huh?

Last Saturday I woke up panicked about an assignment I had missed turning in to my Comparative Lit. teacher because I had skipped the class on Friday. I've missed a few smaller assignments in the class because I'm close enough to graduation that I really don't care what grade I get as long as I pass, but I began to hyperventilate and a cold sweat trickled down my spine because this was a fairly weighty assignment. My mind started to race through ways to beg forgiveness from the professor so that I could turn in the assignment late - and then I remembered I actually had gone to class and had turned in the assignment. I had dreamed up the whole scenario.

This class is one I've skipped fairly often recently. Was my brain just expressing some latent guilt at having skipped so often?

I remember discussing dreams in my high school psychology class, and the theory was posited that as we go through life, our brain creates different memory records of our life: one based on reality, that is, what we actually experience through our senses, and numerous other records based on the subconscious imaginings created without our cognizance and which may be, to some extent, founded in or based loosely on reality. Further, it was said that dreams may be our brain's means of dismissing the alternate records as fictitious; as we play back through those scenarios in our sleep, our brain recognizes them as fake and forgets them - which may also explain why it is so difficult to remember dreams once you've been awake for a while.

So if our dreams are replays of alternate realities created subconsciously throughout our lives, how much can you tell about a person by his/her dreams?

"A man is what he thinks about all day long" - Ralph Waldo Emerson. Really?