No one knows what dreams mean.

Sorry to report this, especially if you've just had a "reading" by someone who told you he/she could tell your future based on what you'd dreamed. The reality is that no one has a clue what dreams mean.

That isn't to say that dreams mean nothing. They are common to all of us and are often as real, when we're dreaming them, as the lives we're living when we wake up. They are, in a very real sense, more real than the movies that move us or make us think or that stick in our memories.

Those, after all, were constructed to have just those results. Dreams just happen.

They come out of our own brains. Dreams are totally of our own doing, even though we're hard pressed to claim authorship. We can't predict them, and they often come in snippets. Once in a while, a dream will seem to have something to do with our current lives, but not often.

Dreams are marvelous constructs of our brains and psyches working together to come up with an elaborate new thing based on nothing -- and based on everything we know. Our subconscious free-painting, free-writing, just being creative.

We long to make sense of our dreams because we're rational beings, but they usually don't.

There have been many explanations of dreams, ranging from repressed memories to the brain shuffling off extraneous material at the end of the day, but none of the existing theories explain why our dreams are so visual and so often narrative and are almost always so REAL.

I love the whole idea of dreams. Any of us and all of us can be so creative in our dreams!

It's a shame that some us -- victims of abuse or war or crime -- may have dreams that disturb us and keep us awake. Those who have such dreams over and over need to seek some kind of counseling, as these aren't normal dreams. And even those of us who haven't been through harrowing events have bad dreams from time to time. Sometimes it's a result of stress at our jobs or in our relationships or whatever is making us miserable. If such dreams persist, again it's time to seek counseling, because something is probably wrong in our waking lives that is causing such dreams.

Most dreams, I think, are fairly pleasant. Sort of like the mind relaxing at the end of the day.

And though I have to say again that dreams really don't mean anything -- or anything you or I can use in planning our lives -- some dreams sometimes are pretty transparent. I have a recurring dream that I'm in the army. And I'm my current -- way-over-the-limit -- age. I'm this really old dude in basic training. There obviously has been a mistake.

So why do I have this dream? Why not one about Viet Nam, where I served a year out with the infantry and even got a bullet hole in my helmet as a souvenir? Probably because the shock of moving from civilian to soldier was more traumatic to my central nervous system than moving from stateside soldier to wartime soldier. Maybe I still haven't processed it.

I also have dreams about my children as babies. Nothing bad; just remembering the endless duties of looking after brand new people I've invited into the world. They're all cute in the dreams, and nothing bad happens. And they've all turned out more or less okay as adults.

So why am I dreaming about babies? Maybe the shock of being a new parent still hasn't quite registered? After all these years?

Dreams are real. We've all experienced them. But the explanation of them is beyond the reaches of physics and chemistry and biology and philosphy and any religion you can think of. Not one human who has ever lived has a clue what they're about. And there has never been an experiment devised to analyze one.

They come to us from us, the mystery of us. And ain't that cause for celebration? Hallelujah!