Each night as Brian Kelly lies down to go to sleep, he prepares himself for a cinematic adventure. His mind races with excitement. Images of foreign countries and battlefields entertain him until he wakes up to the real world of classes and work.

“My dreams are always like an action movie,” says Kelly, 23. “Once I dreamt that my brother and I were in Costa Rica or something, and we were in the middle of a war. We came across these kids in a field, and we bent down to help them until we realized they were actually the enemy. We had to sprint away dodging the line of fire.”

As entertaining as dreams can be, they can also provide great insight into the subconscious. Irwin Rosen, a retired psychologist, taught a course on dream interpretation at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka for many years. Rosen says a dream is the disguised fulfillment of an unconscious wish.

He says that elements for dreams usually come from an event or conversation that has happened but is dismissed from consciousness. After it is dismissed, it becomes subject to distortions in the unconscious.

“Dreams offer a kind of thinking where logic of everyday life is suspended,” Rosen says. “We dream of people who are long passed or of different places. The contribution of the unconscious wishes becomes more pronounced.”

After the passing of her grandma last year, Shannon Lobb, 21, says the grandmother often is present in her dreams.

“Sometimes I dream about events that actually had happened with her there, like reliving them,” Lobb says. “And other times we’re doing things we never did together, or we’re somewhere familiar to me but she’d never even been.”

Lawrence psychologist Spencer Payne says he thinks dreams can be a consolidation of events, linked in an emotional way. Payne says dreams compare current experiences to past experiences in how they are alike.

“I think there can be emotional meaning in dreams,” Payne says. “Especially in how we are relating to events, things, and people and in how relationships play out in dreams.”

After experiencing a night full of tornado sirens last spring, Zach Phillips, 21, says he went to sleep and had a dream of a tornado tearing through Lawrence.

“I looked out my window, and I could see it coming down the street,” Phillips says. “I watched it go all over campus and Lawrence. It came right in front of my house but never hit it. When I woke up, it took me a minute to realize it was just a dream.”

This is where nightmares come into play. Rosen says a nightmare is a dream that doesn’t do its job well enough so it fails. He says the subconscious is insufficiently disguised, arousing anxiety that wakes us up.

Rosen says that sleep studies have found that everyone has four or five dreams per night, occurring during the stage of sleep called REM, rapid eye movement. Dreams tend to occur toward the morning and preserve our sleep. Although some people report not dreaming at all, Rosen says that everyone always dreams, they just do not always remember their dreams.

“When we fall asleep, we fall into a deep stage of sleep then we come up out of it into a lighter stage,” Rosen says. “When this occurs we either proceed to wakefulness or fall into a dream, then pivot back to the deeper stage.”

To find the meaning in dreams, some people keep dream journals, logging events or people from their dreams to help make sense of them. Payne says the mind puts people’s experiences into an emotional filing system instead of alphabetical or logical. To make sense of dreams would require finding the emotional link.

“Remember Scarlett O’Hara’s famous line from ‘Gone with the Wind,’ ‘I’ll think about it tomorrow,” Rosen says. “Well, Scarlett, if it’s important enough, you’ll dream about it tonight.”