Although the idea of dreams has always been a psychological one, there is a philosophical side to them. Descartes once said, "For all I know, I might be dreaming" (Bruder/Moore, Philosophy, 81). This conjecture of Descatres was one that explained the concept of dreams. He asked the question, How do we know that we are not dreaming and our whole life is but a dream? There can never be an answer to this question but it proves that there is a philosophical view of dreams. A dream is a form of mental activity that occurs during sleep. Dreams reveal our inner most secrets and even allow us to emerge our hidden selves. Because they unleash some of our most intimate experiences, every dream is unique. Most dreams are in the form of interrupted stories, made up partly of memories, with frequent shifts of scene. Our ancestors believed that dreams were messages from the gods. Descartes idea that we are not aware that we could be dreaming is found in the answer of lucid dreaming. This is the idea that you know that you are dreaming. Lucid dreams usually begin in the midst of a dream when they realize that they are not experiencing a physical reality but it is a dream. Being lucid in a dream increases your deliberate influence over the course of events. Once you are dreaming, you are likely to chose some activity that is only possible in dreams. You will always have the choice of how much control you want to exert and what kind. A dreamers ability to succeed at this seems to depend a lot on the dreamers confidence. Sigmund Freud's dream theory "the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious; it is the secret foundation of psychoanalysis" (Gardner, Skeptical, 10). But earlier efforts have been made to unravel dreams. Dreams were often interpreted as precognition's of future events or visions of current, faraway events. Essayist, humanist, and skeptic Michel Montaigne wrote "I believe it to be true that dreams are the ...
