Do dreams reflect reality?

THAT DREAMS contain hidden meanings is an old idea. The Biblical Book of Genesis, written down about 2,500 years ago, describes how Joseph, son of Jacob, interpreted the Egyptian pharaoh’s dreams of fat and thin cattle as predicting years first of plenty and then of famine. In China, meanwhile, the most popular work on dream interpretation has long been the “Zhougong Jie Meng”, a dictionary of explanations for weird and wonderful dreams written 500 years earlier still. It is, however, only since the publication of Sigmund Freud’s treatise “The Interpretation of Dreams”, in 1899, that dreams have become a subject of serious scientific scrutiny.