There’s an interesting article on Scientific American’s site. Basically a Harvard psychologist decided to study what’s the correlation with our conscious thoughts and our dreams. And the result is that we most often dream about stuff and scenarios that we don’t like to think about consciously. “Maybe this is why students dream of sleeping through an important exam, why actors dream of going blank on stage, and why truckers dream of driving off the road,” Wegner offers. “Dreams are where our thoughts go when we try to put the thoughts out of mind.”

The explanation offered was that our prefrontal cortex is really inactive during REM sleep. And the prefrontal cortex is what’s responsible for planning and mental control. Which results in lack of control to keep our thoughts thinking about unpleasant thoughts. Maybe that’s why our dreams are usually really strange in comparison with our daily lives.