I had a dream where I was intimate with my mom?

Lets also not forget that usually a dream is just a dream, they have no meaning. Not real, not something we'd do or want to do. Dreams don't have to make any sense.

May I ask please, for this response where are the "mianstream (sic), aprropriate (sic) sources" that you yourself requested?

Or, could this be unsubstantiated conjecture?

Thank you for your attention,
Bobbywhy

May I ask please, for this response where are the "mianstream (sic), aprropriate (sic) sources" that you yourself requested?

Or, could this be unsubstantiated conjecture?

Thank you for your attention,
Bobbywhy

Neurobiologists and neuropsychiatrists tend to think of dreaming sleep as "physiologically determined" and shaped by the activation of brain neurons, according to J. Allan Hobson, M.D., a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who directs the Neurophysiology Laboratory of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. The implications of this activation hypothesis contrast sharply with the psychoanalytic view of the dreaming process.

"What is at stake here is a theory of dreams that is scientifically valid," Dr. Hobson told 21stC. "If psychoanalytic dream theory is not scientifically valid, then psychoanalytic dream interpretation is not scientifically valid. I believe it is not."

Mitchison argued in a Nature article3 that the brain's neural memory systems are easily overloaded and that humans experience dream-laden REM to eliminate cognitive debris. In other words, dreams are nothing more than a mechanism for the nervous system to clear the brain of unnecessary, even harmful memories.

Drs. Crick and Mitchison called their theory "reverse learning" and quipped in their 1983 Nature article that "We dream to forget." In essence, they described dreams as garbage to be discarded from memory. In a later article in Behavioural Brain Research, Crick and Mitchison stated, "There is no evidence to suggest that remembered dreams are anything more than an accidental by-product of this (REM) function"; furthermore, they directly attacked psychoanalytic theory by writing, "To a modern neuroscientist Freud's theories, in spite of their appeal to the contemporary imagination, seem little better than the common belief in earlier times that dreams foretold the future, a belief which also held strong intuitive appeal."4 Their views left little room for the idea that it is psychologically valuable to analyze dreams.

Hobson adds, "Psychoanalysts want people to believe that they can interpret dreams and discover deep-seated meanings that are at the root of the dream process. I just don't think there is any scientific reason to believe that."

Harvard University psychologist Deirdre Barrett might have some answers for us. In a recent review of evolutionary theories concerning the possible adaptive function of dreaming, Barrett shrugs off the better-known psychoanalytic theories of dreams (for example, Freud’s “wish fulfillment” and Jungian archetypes) as being irreconcilable with a Darwinian framework and instead highlights the major contemporary, biologically informed theories. Remember, the key question for us to consider is why dreaming occurs at all, since it’s not immediately apparent why natural selection wouldn’t have simply engineered a dreamless, non-REM sleep.

Here's an easily readable review of an article describing a logical approach to getting started.

http://psychcentral.com/lib/2011/how...its-important/

Here's an easily readable review of an article describing a logical approach to getting started.
The author being reviewed is, interestingly, a Political Science major turned psychologist, exactly like Evo's friend Professor Noll. He too went to Harvard.

Theoretically, I'm an evolutionary psychologist; I believe that dreams are essentially thinking in a different biochemical state and that they can be extremely helpful because of focusing on our life-issues from a very different perspective.
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I use dreams in my own self-exploration, in work with psychotherapy clients, and in psychology research.