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Dreams and nightmares have long haunted the dark regions of the human mind.

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Today, however, we are finding ways to solve the age-old riddle of our subconscious.

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It may not be long before we can control and plan our own dreams.

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Every night, when we surrender ourselves to sleep, we enter a dark continent,

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the mysterious world of dreams and nightmares.

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With us, we bring our strongest wishes and our deepest fears.

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On the view screen of our mind, feelings are magically transformed into pictures.

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If our visions are truly terrifying, we awake, still haunted, unsure whether the experience was dream or reality.

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For many of us, the bad dreams, which we call nightmares, are the most vivid and most likely to be remembered.

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When we awake, we may recall nothing or remember only fragments, but we all dream almost two hours every night.

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Nearly five years of our lives are spent dreaming.

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Since ancient times, people have known that their night lives had deep significance.

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They have told each other their dreams and given them artistic expression.

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All ages and cultures have recognized the bizarre imagery, romance, terror, and access to hidden truths of the dream state.

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Today, interest in dreams is growing.

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In dream laboratories around the world, the sleeping brain has become the object of scientific inquiry.

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The studies at these modern research centers go far beyond mere speculation about the subconscious mind.

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We are beginning to understand how and why we dream.

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In a sleep lab, electrical sensors monitor the motion of each eye.

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A chart simultaneously records eye movement, brain waves, pulse, and muscle activity.

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Though our eyes are closed during sleep, they are not inactive.

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At times, they dart about as if scanning a picture.

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It is during these periods of rapid eye movement, or REM, that our fleeting dream life exists.

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By charting brain waves and rapid eye movements, researchers have mapped out the stages of a night's sleep.

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They have found a remarkable pattern, which we all repeat every night.

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A young couple was photographed at 15-minute intervals through the night.

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Like clockwork, the dreams come about every hour and a half.

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Before and after each dream, we are likely to shift positions.

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But during the dream itself, we lie still, as if paralyzed.

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As the night wears on, the dreams grow longer and more mysterious, rich in symbolic imagery from our dim past.

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So regular is this dream cycle that scientists believe dreaming is a built-in biological process.

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They have even located the origin of this process within the brain.

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On the underside of the brain is the brainstem, which controls unconscious functions such as sleep and waking.

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Certain giant nerve cells in the brainstem trigger our dreams.

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When these cells send their signals to higher parts of the brain, rapid eye movements begin.

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At the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Dr. Alan Hobson is one of the four most experts on dreaming in cats and humans.

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This is the electrical activity of a single nerve cell in the brainstem of the cat during dreaming sleep.

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On the upper trace, you see the individual signals of that cell.

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And on the lower trace, you see the electrical activity in the visual system during a dreaming sleep episode.

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By understanding the way that the nerve cells of the brain actually generate the dreaming sleep state,

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we hope to be able to gain some insights as to how the dream itself is manufactured.

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Dr. Hobson helped discover the random and irregular nature of the signals that triggered dreams and nightmares.

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This finding could help explain the bizarre form of dreams, how they are created from bits and pieces of seemingly unrelated memory.

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Although scientists are beginning to learn how dreams are caused in the brain, just why we dream remains mysterious.

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In a sleep lab, a complete night's dreaming can be sampled, whether or not the subject is skilled at remembering dreams.

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At Rush Presbyterian Hospital in Chicago, Dr. Rosalyn Cartwright is testing her theory of why we dream.

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Her subjects are women suffering from depression.

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We have two people sleeping here tonight who are wired up for recording their EEG, their brain waves, and their eye movements, so we'll know when they start to dream.

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We're particularly interested in these women because both of them are undergoing stress.

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One has just completed a divorce and the second one is making up her mind about divorcing her husband.

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Dr. Cartwright is interested in the healing power of dreams.

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By helping people reshape their dreams, she hopes to improve their waking lives.

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I think we dream in order to keep a steady sense of ourselves, who we are in the world, gets kind of fragmented during the day,

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we get diverse messages from other people about who we are.

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I think we take all that information and program it through the night and reconcile it to our concept of ourselves so that we can get up and say,

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I'm intact, I am who I am, and fight another day.

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Dr. Cartwright and her assistant watch the chart recorders carefully, waiting for rapid eye movements to signal the start of a dream.

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Okay, here she goes.

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We've got a run period going. I knew she was about to begin.

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Nancy, what was going through your mind just before it called you?

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There was an ant for whole cat beer.

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And there was something, oh yeah, right before the beer ad, we were driving, yes, and oh yes, we seem to have gotten stuck or caught in traffic and we're wedged behind this fat car.

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Then how did that fat cat, no, that whole cat beer ad come on?

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It's like we're driving down the street and that's what we see in the window, you know, like people have pats, blue ribbon beer signs in their window.

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They have whole cat beer.

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And is that about it?

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Yep.

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Okay, Nancy, you can go on back to sleep.

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What's the pole cat?

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Well, last night I thought it was mountain lion, but that's not true. I know. It stinks is all I can remember.

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That's for sure it stinks. Do you know what a pole cat is?

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No, I really don't. They're in New England, I think, and that's all I can remember.

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You've never heard that a skunk is called a pole cat?

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No! Is that right?

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Yeah, I didn't know. No, I didn't know a skunk was a pole cat.

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That pole cat, that beer drinking pole cat was very clearly a symbol for her lost husband, and it was the first sign that she's begun to be able to be angry at him rather than hurt and neglected and feeling sorry for herself.

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That's a healthy kind of a dream. That's kind of a dream I would like to help more depressed women have to show a bit of anger and call them a stinker.

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Go ahead and you'll feel better in the morning.

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After 16 years, Frank has just lost his job. This recreation shows how his feelings of insecurity are reflected in his dreams.

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For the last few nights, he's been the victim of painful, recurrent nightmares.

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Frank, why don't you come to bed? I've got to get some sleep.

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I think I'll read for a while.

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Fearful of another nightmare, Frank avoids sleep as long as he can.

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Frank experiences the odd sensation of both participating in his dream and being a spectator.

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He jumbles up images from his past and confuses one time and place with another.

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Finally, his deepest fears of rejection are acted out before him.

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The dream is over.

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Frank, Frank, Frank! It's only a dream. It's only a dream. It's alright.

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It may be only a dream, but when nightmares this severe strike, the terror lingers on.

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For these are symptoms of real trouble in our lives. They are warnings that we ignore and are peril.

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In the nightmare state, feelings of helplessness and terror grip our minds with a strange power.

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A form of paralysis based deep in the brain holds us immobile during the bad dream.

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There is, however, a night experience still more fearful than ordinary nightmares.

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At the State University in Hershey, Pennsylvania, brainwave electrodes and low-light cameras record the awesome phenomenon of night terrors.

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These are people being treated for night terrors which are extremely rare in adults.

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The precise cause of these attacks is unknown, but brainwave studies show that night terrors erupt suddenly from a deep stage of sleep when there are no rapid eye movements.

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Frank, Frank, Frank!

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Dr. Anthony Cales directs the Sleep Research and Treatment Center.

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Night terrors are one of the most frightening experiences known to man.

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If we try to get recall from night terror sufferers, most often they're amnesic for the event.

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But when they do have recall, these generally relate to certain kinds of death themes.

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That is, the individual is being crushed, the individual is suffocating, some kind of catastrophe is occurring.

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As the victim's anxiety mounts, their pulse may double or triple.

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After they awake, their terrified state may persist for several minutes.

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It is as if some primeval fear response, present in us all, is uncontrollably triggered.

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Since ancient times, nightmare images have been a source of wonder and a wellspring of creativity.

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Before the invention of modern psychology, many people believe that nightmares were caused by indigestion.

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Others thought that spirits, witches, vampires, devils, or mythological creatures such as the incubus were to blame.

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Freud and his disciples explained the nightmare in terms of repressed sexual desires.

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Today's psychologists take a broader view, recognizing that not all conflicts are purely sexual.

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They associate some nightmares with traumatic events in our lives.

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Other nightmares deal with long-term, unresolved conflicts.

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They transform our most profound anxieties into intensely dramatic dream pictures.

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Children's dream paintings reveal a common theme of attack by monsters.

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Nightmares occur in all children.

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The child is being asked to master the kinds of instinctual impulses and aggressive impulses that the child has.

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But the child hasn't developed the kind of mastery to control these impulses fully.

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And instead of saying, well, I'm very angry at my brother or my sister or I want to hit them,

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the child may say, this monster is after me.

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The child is being asked to master the kinds of instinctual impulses that the child has.

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Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!

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What happened to you?

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I had a bad dream.

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What was your dream?

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A gorilla.

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I was running my bike and a gorilla was chasing me.

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And I wanted to jump down and try to eat me up and I was scared.

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Wow, how are you feeling now?

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Scared.

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Scared, huh?

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Actually, it's a time when they do need a certain kind of reassurance,

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a certain kind of support from the parents before they fall asleep at night.

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And usually this is very, very sufficient.

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I'm going to put you back in bed and if that monster comes back,

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I want you to look him straight in the eye and tell him to go away.

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Okay?

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Night night.

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As in children's bad dreams, when adults have nightmares,

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anxiety and aggression are transformed into fearful images and threatening events.

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The unrecognizable figures we see are thought to represent parts of ourselves

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that we are not yet in touch with and therefore fear.

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There is no simple key to understanding and controlling our dreams.

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There are mysteries that each of us has to work out for ourselves.

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Over an 11-year period, therapist Christine Sanfilippo has recorded her dreams

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and used them to plumb the depths of her subconscious.

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For years, Christine had a recurrent nightmare in which she is chased by the ocean.

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The dream is to take part in a dream circle therapy group.

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Christine is trying to unravel and confront the powerful feelings behind her nightmare.

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She hopes to re-experience the dream state and bring her dreams back to life.

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Christine, I'd like you to lie down in the center with your head right here

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and take the position that you take in the dream when the ocean is coming over you.

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I want you to let this be the ocean rushing in on you.

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Can you tell us what you're feeling?

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I feel very afraid and helpless.

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I feel like the ocean is suffering.

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I feel like the ocean is suffocating me and pressing down on me.

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It's very powerful.

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And I feel like I can't breathe. I have to resist.

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I have to resist it as much as I can because it's too powerful.

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I'm being overwhelmed. I'm losing myself.

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I feel like I'm sinking down into the feeling.

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By understanding and facing her ocean dream fears,

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Christine comes to a new stage in her personal growth.

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My dreams have changed as I have, dealing specifically with people more directly.

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I've become much more spontaneous, more willing and able to relax, be more open, be more vulnerable,

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get a lot closer to people.

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Unraveling a dream is like unraveling a person. It's a very rewarding experience.

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Beyond the working out of concrete personal problems, there is another dimension to the dream world.

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The dream images created by the unconscious include certain symbols which Carl Jung called universal archetypes.

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Of these symbols, the ocean is one of the most common.

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Jung believed these symbols unite mankind in what he called the collective unconscious.

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Perhaps dream images exist in the structure of the brain.

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Or maybe it is only our common experience that produces them.

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Whatever their origin, the symbols of our dreams serve to remind us of the infinite mystery that resides in the human mind.

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The best way to remember and begin exploring dreams is to write them down in the morning.

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With enough experience, it's actually possible to change the outcome of dreams and nightmares.

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Dream experts suggest that before going to sleep, we should mentally prepare ourselves to confront our dream fears

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and act vigorously to make wishes come true.

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For those who attempt it, the voyage into full awareness of the dream world is an adventure beyond compare.

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Good night and pleasant dreams.

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Tonight on the History Channel.

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Her legend spans three decades in two wars.

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She fought the battle for late-take gulf that took the war to Japan.

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Fighting in kamikaze hotspots, she was the most hit carrier of the fleet.

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Battle scarred but never broken.

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The fighting eye, the story of the USS Intrepid as fleet week continues.

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Tonight at 8 on the History Channel.