I believe dreams to simply be partial thoughts, images, and sounds that we have experienced throughout our days; particularly those that been thought on recently. Sometimes it might be subconscious thoughts accumulating, such as fears forming into a nightmare; and perhaps just random thoughts about work, family, and life in general.
In summary, I think it can be explained mostly by scientific observations on brain activity during REM sleep stages.

I believe dreams to simply be partial thoughts, images, and sounds that we have experienced throughout our days; particularly those that been thought on recently. — Lone Wolf

Clearly dreams are not something which we have already experienced, they are completely made up, imaginary.

@Metaphysician Undercover Partial thoughts, images, and sounds, all smashed together. No, we have not experienced dreams in a complete sense, but each piece of our dreams seem to have came from fragments of previous experiences. One may dream of a loved one who has passed on, we have seen that person; they may "say" or "do" something, such as performing an action that was habitual to them, we've seen/heard/ felt that before.
For example, a dream that I could have may be of close friend who had died a short time ago. I have seen that friend, I think about that friend, and subconsciously it become mixed into other things that I think about. An example may be a nightmare in that I watch my friend die in battle in a violent way; I know my friend is dead, and I have seen pictures of battles, and think about it. My friend did not die in battle, which in that sense it is imaginary. But a mixing of facts up into a vision seems likely to me. Adding to that, the changes in electrical currents of the brain during sleep to make us "feel" emotion that we might not have otherwise felt.

I believe dreams to simply be partial thoughts, images, and sounds that we have experienced throughout our days; particularly those that [have] been thought on recently. — Lone Wolf

This agrees with the Continual-Activation Theory of Dreaming, a neurological explanation of memory consolidation during sleep, and dreaming as by-product.

The type I dream, a thought-like mentation, is the consequence of the memory replay when the declarative memory data is retrieved from the temporary memory store to the conscious subsidiary systems of the working memory for processing during NREM sleep. On the other hand, type II dream, a more dream-like mentation, often occurs during REM sleep, when the procedural memory is being transferred from the temporary memory to the long-term memory.

Zhang, Jie (2004). Memory Process and the Function of Sleep. (6–6 ed.). Journal of Theoretics.
http://www.journaloftheoretics.com/Articles/6-6/Zhang.pdf

It seems to me we have a dialogue of sorts almost continually in our consciousness. Is it coherent? Sometimes it is, but many times it is just fragments. Like little video clips. If I focus – like now – I can control the direction and content of my thoughts. However, I observe myself wandering a lot during the day. Can this understanding tell us something about dreaming? Dreaming seems like wandering – sometimes there is a direction – like sexual dreams. Most of the time my dreams seem unfocused; like my wandering during the daytime. The similarity does not seem coincidence – what do you think?

Partial thoughts, images, and sounds, all smashed together. No, we have not experienced dreams in a complete sense, but each piece of our dreams seem to have came from fragments of previous experiences. One may dream of a loved one who has passed on, we have seen that person; they may "say" or "do" something, such as performing an action that was habitual to them, we've seen/heard/ felt that before. — Lone Wolf

I don't thing my dreams come from fragments of previous experience. This is completely inconsistent with what I experience in dreaming. What I experience is mostly new experiences in my dreams, with just a few, but very few, fragments of previous experience. So for instance, your example of a dream about a loved one. Let's say the loved on is Fred. In the dream, Fred may look nothing like Fred, and not act at all like Fred, but only because my mind for some reason designates the person as "Fred", do I recognize this individual as Fred. But It's very clear to me that the dream does not consist of fragments of past experiences of Fred, because Fred in the dream is doing things which Fred would not normally do, and upon waking, I see that Fred in the dream, didn't even look like Fred in real life. So the question is why did my mind even think it is Fred who is doing these things?

I don't thing my dreams come from fragments of previous experience. This is completely inconsistent with what I experience in dreaming. What I experience is mostly new experiences in my dreams, with just a few, but very few, fragments of previous experience. So for instance, your example of a dream about a loved one. Let's say the loved on is Fred. — Metaphysician Undercover

There a concept of distorted reality in a dream - right? You are connected to your day (waking) world – reality – via Fred. Although Fred does not look or act like Fred. Do you distort Fred, in order to remake him? Is it your wish – desire – to change him? Or is it just an exercise in fantasy? Or both? Remember you love Fred – that is important. I assert – dreams have a purpose – what is it for Fred? We always want to alter our waking world – we are never satisfied – we are not content. Dreams express our discontentedness – distain – depression – desire – delusions – dependence – deliriousness – defensiveness. Are dreams our attempt to break out of prison? A jailbreak? I don’t act upon every fantasy in my real life – I am constrained. But I do in my dreams. Fred is loved, but also hated – it is complicated – is it not?

I can control the direction and content of my thoughts. However, I observe myself wandering a lot during the day. Can this understanding tell us something about dreaming? Dreaming seems like wandering – sometimes there is a direction – like sexual dreams. Most of the time my dreams seem unfocused; like my wandering during the daytime. The similarity does not seem coincidence – what do you think? — woodart

I think daydreams can be equated with mind wandering, or creative thinking.

Christoff, Kalina; Alan M. Gordon; Jonathan Smallwood; Rachelle Smith; Jonathan W. Schooler (2009-05-11).
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/21/8719.full.pdf

I remember the day my Father died – that night he came to me in a dream and said – “I love you”. That was it – short and sweet – I will never forget it. — woodart

This is beautiful, thank you for sharing. Dreams are really hard to determine and I fear would fall on the individual experience to ascertain an explanation behind them; guilt, passions, emotions that you are attempting to articulate through abstract imagery. Indeed, from a Jungian perspective dreams reveal the language of the psyche and the subconscious, but sometimes dreams can also just be cognitive rubbish as your brain attempts to recover.

I had one dream not long ago - actually in August 2015 that is how powerful this dream was! - where I was lying on a grey couch and I had a son, a toddler aged maybe 3 or 4, a little blonde boy who was lying on top of me and hugging me really tightly. He was smiling and his eyes were closed as tightly as he hugged me while I was relaxed, also smiling with my eyes closed, as I wrapped my arms around him. I cannot describe to you the feeling that I felt in this brief moment in the dream, but it was like absolute love. It was genuine love, unconditional and I could sense the love from my son (or that boy in the dream as I don't have any children) as much as the love I felt for him that it was so overwhelming, I woke up hyperventilating as though the intensity of the feeling in this dream caused me to hold my breath. I could not shut up about it for weeks and in my whole life I have never felt what I felt in that dream. It was one simple image of me and a little boy but the feeling was just overwhelming.

I am not sure what that dream meant, again I have no children, but sometimes it may provide you with access to knowledge, for me maybe the knowledge of what real love could actually feel like, maybe it describes my unconditional loving attributes that is parallel to a maternalism (I work helping disadvantaged children). I don't know, in the end we have only our own interpretations to rely on and that requires reason and a genuine understanding of ourselves and our history.

in my whole life I have never felt what I felt in that dream. It was one simple image of me and a little boy but the feeling was just overwhelming. — TimeLine

I would say this is a truly "Holy" experience - you should treasure it forever.

I think daydreams can be equated with mind wandering, or creative thinking. — Galuchat

I think it was a very good article. I learned things from it. However, I have some frustration in this thread and others. I can’t get people to respond to my thoughts – the way I want – it makes me sad/angry – what do I do? Should I accuse you of changing the topic, quibbling, dodging the point, of being an idiot. What if I am the idiot? In my dreams and thoughts maybe I am an idiot or you – or both. My dreams and thoughts may wander, but releases something relating to the real world. I am not sure of myself a lot while being awake. I am sure as hell - not sure of myself while dreaming. Dreams are uncertain for a reason – this is important. Life is not certain anywhere - anytime. Dreams help us to handle an uncertain life – with more uncertainty in dreams. Fighting fire with fire – the fire of uncertainty while dreaming.

The simplest answer is that being conscious of the world itself demands a constant process of anticipatory imagery. We have to forward model the sensations of what are about to happen so as to reduce the amount of things that are surprising. Even as you reach for a door knob, you are forming all kinds of expectancies about how the knob will feel as it turns in your hand and what will be the generality of what will be seen beyond.

In a state of sensory deprivation, these kinds of anticipatory images will develop into highly detailed - but fleeting and disconnected - states of perception themselves. At a rate of every half second, one image will replace another, with a loose associative knowledge.

That is why dreams seem a constant chase after meaning. You are still trying to make some kind of narrative sense of what is going on - fitting some tale to it. But as MU points out, Fred is never Fred as every passing image throws up a new scene.

On this view, vivid R.E.M. dreams serve no great psychic purpose. R.E.M. exists to stir up the brain to near waking state so you will be ready to go if something does wake you up. The images are just what the brain has to do - fill in the blanks - because it is designed to generate a constant flow of anticipations and those become vivid when actually answering sensation is absent.

You can catch that happen when you first fall asleep - hypnagogic imagery. The brain cuts off from the outside world and you immediately plunge into the bright light of some fantastical vision. But it lacks the narrative structure of a R.E.M. dream. That scrabble after explanation takes time to build its own confused history.

I hardly ever dream. In fact I can't remember the last time I actually had a dream, it's been at least several months. When I do they tend to be uncomfortable or scary.

Although I do have memories of a few dreams that were quite nice. My desires were instantly gratified, I was powerful and perfect. I'm not talking about sexual stuff either. I was just content with myself. I think one of these positive dreams was of me teaching philosophy to students - I did not stutter like I do in real life, I did not get anxious or nervous. I was in my element and the students apparently loved me. It was nice.

Reminds me of the Freudian theory of dreams. Freudian psychoanalysis has a complicated reputation, not altogether positive, and for good reason. In fact his theories were essentially "metaphysical" despite his protests to the contrary. An interesting theory he articulated what that dreams were the method in which the unconscious seeks satisfaction. When we are conscious, we are given these needs and desires that throw us into a state of discomfort - the real world forces us to make choices and relegate resources to accomplish our goals. In a dream, however, we're not dealing with reality. We effectively make reality and because of this we can sometimes have very pleasant dreams in which the desires the unconscious produces are instantly gratified. There are more details, mostly related to time, that aren't entirely dissimilar to the metaphysical speculations of Schopenhauer, but I can't remember them right now.

Freud's meta-psychophysics might not be entirely correct, but it certainly makes it all too evident how the dreams we experience are sometimes better than the reality we live in. It's a metaphysical scheme that, like most metaphysical schemes, tells a story with a moral, which is more important than it actually being factually correct. It makes me wish I did dream more.

That is why dreams seem a constant chase after meaning. You are still trying to make some kind of narrative sense of what is going on - fitting some tale to it. But as MU points out, Fred is never Fred as every passing image throws up a new scene.

On this view, vivid R.E.M. dreams serve no great psychic purpose. R.E.M. exists to stir up the brain to near waking state so you will be ready to go if something does wake you up. The images are just what the brain has to do - fill in the blanks - because it is designed to generate a constant flow of anticipations and those become vivid when actually answering sensation is absent. — apokrisis

If there is little or no meaning or value in your dreams, then you are absolutely right – for yourself. However, don’t make the mistake of projecting this on to others. Most people find meaning and value in their dreams. If you do not have the eyes to see – OK – that is your prerogative.

Although I do have memories of a few dreams that were quite nice. My desires were instantly gratified, I was powerful and perfect. I'm not talking about sexual stuff either. I was just content with myself. I think one of these positive dreams was of me teaching philosophy to students — darthbarracuda

I think a lot of the function of dreams is wish fulfillment. Also I think we practice in our dreams. I build things and many times I dream of solutions or near solutions to practical problems. Dreams can go outside the bounds of logic and sometimes this is exactly what we need to approach a problem or situation. It may not solve it, but it looks at it in a different way. Different eyes are what we get in dreams.

It makes me wish I did dream more. — darthbarracuda

I mentioned earlier in this thread I took a course in how to record dreams. There are techniques to teach you how to wake up and write them down. Very powerful stuff and useful.

People find meaning and value in all sorts of experiences, whatever their source.

You don't have to see what @apokrisis said as contradicting your view. Your brain does stuff; you experience that in a certain way. What the brain does has side effects; you experience that too. There may be a "physiological purpose" of some kind to what goes on while you sleep; I think some researchers have also suggested it's the brain finishing processing the day, so that's a more "cognitive purpose," more directly related to your experience. Whatever it's doing can be a real and meaningful experience for you, especially since what it has to work with is mostly your life.

I do wonder how we could possibly resolve a conflict about the nature and meaning of dreams. Philosophers have had a hard enough time dealing with "intuitions." One place to start might be taking a closer look at what I casually described as "experiencing" your dreams. It's clearly way different from other sorts of experience we have.

People find meaning and value in all sorts of experiences, whatever their source.

You don't have to see what apokrisis said as contradicting your view. — Srap Tasmaner

I do not feel contradiction with apokrisis - I view my dreams differently and told him it was his prerogative to see it his way. There can be more than many truths. I really believe it is entirely subjective. There is no grand formula for interpretation and meaning. The value and purpose we place on dreams is totally subjective. Dreams mean what you think they mean – don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

I do not feel contradiction with apokrisis - I view my dreams differently and told him it was his prerogative to see it his way. There can be more than many truths. I really believe it is entirely subjective. There is no grand formula for interpretation and meaning. The value and purpose we place on dreams is totally subjective. Dreams mean what you think they mean – don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. — woodart

In a sense, that's saying there's just nothing for philosophy to do here, and that's fine.

But maybe there is some stuff to get into here. Our non-dream experiences include a bodily component that others can (at least in principle) witness. And our bodies are not so dramatically different from each other that when we talk about those sorts of everyday experiences, we can assume a lot of that experience is similar. Often when someone says, "I know how you feel," that can be literally true.

Dreams, though, seem to be a unique class of experience. Even though our minds are broadly similar, just as our bodies are, the whole range of physical correlatives is missing. You get mentation naked, so to speak, and that seems like something philosophy, as well as psychology, would want a look at. Only you can't have that. All you get is people's reports.

Even if dreams were uniquely subjective, how could we know?

I agree with this approach -- to the extent that we can remember dreams, dreaming is the side-show of the brain processing the content of its experiences. The "weirdness" of dreams is suggestive of how memories are stored -- not in an entirely "rationalized manner" but by some other system brains work out. It works -- leave it alone.

I don't know how to account for the type of compelling images that the brain sometimes serves up during dreaming--scenes that rise above all the other dreams we have had. Some other process is at work there, like as not.

I have this image of the brain putting bits of memories in specific (real, material) locations in the brain, and then linking them together, so that useful, cohesive information can be found, assembled, and handed up to the conscious mind. But, in the process, odd-ball bits are put next to each other and at that moment, an odd-ball bit of a dream is produced.

It's almost like in the absence of sensory input or (what usually passes for) conscious thought, you end up eavesdropping on (other parts/systems of) the brain going about its business, and you don't understand what the hell you're listening to.

(Just speculative chit-chat.)

In a sense, that's saying there's just nothing for philosophy to do here, and that's fine. — Srap Tasmaner

I do not agree there is nothing for philosophy to do. We use philosophy to create stories – interpret things – define ourselves. We use philosophy to give structure to our lives. The lives we live awake and when we dream. Philosophy is our spirit guide. My thoughts and ideas are like spirits. I am also a spirit when I dream. I use philosophy to guide my vision. I am on a vision quest and I hope you are too.

I guess we part company here then. Best of luck to you.

I'm speaking for the scientific research. If you want to believe something else, it won't change that.

I have this image of the brain putting bits of memories in specific (real, material) locations in the brain, and then linking them together, so that useful, cohesive information can be found, assembled, and handed up to the conscious mind. But, in the process, odd-ball bits are put next to each other and at that moment, an odd-ball bit of a dream is produced. — Bitter Crank

I think it is so - we are forced to be flexible with our mind data and interpretation. We surf a wave of thought – sometimes we are on top of the wave awake – sometimes we are below the surface dreaming. We move in consciousness and many times we are not sure where we are going.

It's almost like in the absence of sensory input or (what usually passes for) conscious thought, you end up eavesdropping on (other parts/systems of) the brain going about its business, and you don't understand what the hell you're listening to. — Srap Tasmaner

I like this thought. We spy on ourselves. We disconnect from parts of ourselves because it is weird or foreign – but we still observe. We have to because it is us. We try to bring the weirdness into our fold of understanding, but we are not always able to.

I'm speaking for the scientific research. If you want to believe something else, it won't change that. — apokrisis

Scientific research with dreams is very nascent. I don’t necessarily want to change your ideas – I want to find out if you can add to mine. Teach us all – make us richer with understanding. I think there is more than one way to look at things – especially dreams.

One thing that seems very apparent – people can be and/or are uncomfortable with dreams. They can sometimes make us nervous.

It doesn't seem that our brains, while alive, are able to operate below a particular activity threshold for very long normally, at least not without assistance (chemical for example) or without something being physically off-kilter. When they're above the threshold, which is a "mentality" threshold, it amounts to experiential data. Dreams are simply that above-the-threshold experiential data when you're asleep. They reflect things you've experienced and thought about previously, because that's how brains work in general. But it's weird experience relative to normal waking experience.

Should I accuse you of changing the topic, quibbling, dodging the point, of being an idiot. — woodart

Feel free to accuse me of anything you like. In turn, I could accuse you of answering your own questions and having an agenda which isn't interested in the acquisition of knowledge that contradicts your own opinions. For what purpose? To advertise: charlatan for hire, dreams interpreted here?

When it comes to thinking about a particular subject, I prefer to draw conclusions from the relevant science(s), imagine possibilities which are consistent with those conclusions, and then engage in speculative brainstorming. Navel gazing sessions rarely have any practical, problem-solving value.

The value and purpose we place on dreams is not totally subjective, given current research in neuroscience (an intersubjective activity). However; it's your prerogative to assign any meaning you like to dreams, consult palm readers and astrologers, partake in seances, etc. if that's part of your "vision quest". For many, however; philosophy is a knowledge quest.

They are unusual from an evolutionary perspective since they appear to present false information which could endanger the animal itself. All I can think is that perhaps before we were saturated with culture, and our minds were more limited, they were useful predictive devices.
I actually enjoy a lot of my dreams more than real life and the more I write them down the more real they appear when I sleep. I hope to gain greater control over them at some point.

The value and purpose we place on dreams is not totally subjective, given current research in neuroscience (an intersubjective activity). However; it's your prerogative to assign any meaning you like to dreams, consult palm readers and astrologers, partake in seances, etc. if that's part of your "vision quest". For many, however; philosophy is a knowledge quest. — Galuchat

I seem to have hit a cord with you. Your ire seems perked. Perfectly OK. If science is your church – good for you – sometimes it is mine too. However, I do not see all explanations there. For me science is a tool – many times useful – many times inadequate. Especially when considering philosophical issues – many times science is inadequate. Dreams can be understood partially with MRI, EEG, biochemistry, etc. – but I think not substantially. Too many variables – too many wildcards.

What is a vision quest? A quest for knowledge – a search for understanding – an attempt to draw a picture? Philosophy is a picture of the universe we see. Every picture is unique – every person has a different picture/idea of what the world is. Every dream makes a unique statement. Science endeavors to be objective – to pursue repeatable experiments. However, the interpretation of the repeatable data can be different – subjective. Dreams are an area where subjectivity rules. Science can help us with our dreams; but each individual interprets them as we see fit. Dreams can and do make people uneasy – perhaps this is true for you too. It is for me – sometimes.