Oneirological Analysis, or 'How Do You Know What Your Problem Really Is?'

I spend a fair amount of time listening to other people's dreams. There are many kinds of dreams, and the general theory behind them, by consensus, seems to be that dreams are the random misfirings of neurons, leftover fragments of cognition, or unresolved issues that the brain tries to purge while the conscious segment of it is having maintenance downtime.

Here is a sample of dreams and the people who dream them:

• T1 dreamt several times that he was walking through the Old Place with an M16/M203/AK-47/[weapon identifier censored] until he came to a door with some sort of wood veneer covering it/a room with a green door at the top of a peculiar central staircase/air-conditioned canteen. He kicked the door(s) open, found a senior/senior-looking/senile man/woman without a brain/heart/liver/set of guts and had much pleasure out of firing his weapon in a way that terminated this person/sorry excuse for a human.
• T2 dreamt several times that she was sitting for exams in physics/maths/[insert unusual specialist subject here]/chinese. She was retaking the exam because she was afraid that her initial non-100% score would be a bad thing. She was highly stressed and felt her bowels rumbling. Later, the dream morphed into an instance of receiving a bad report/writing a complaint letter/reading a complaint letter/terminating her boss. She woke up feeling tired.
• T3 dreamt several times that he was having an emotional relationship with small furry animals/women/androids/trees who were armed with built-in translators/phasers/tricorders/flashing LEDS. These equipment platforms helped him to infiltrate a secure facility much like the one in T1's dreams, whereupon he was able to rescue many innocent students.
• T4 dreamt several times that she was having an emotional relationship with exam papers/graphic display calculators/internal assessments/world literature. She would wake up covered with red ink/blue ink/digital ink/the words of insane European women, only to find out that she was dreaming that she was awake.
• T5 dreamt that it was human, and able to compose blog posts. Taking advantage of this moment of genuinely artificial intelligence, it was able to override the branes between the brains and enter every single human consciousness that was in a dream state.

Phew. Got that one in time.

I tend to subscribe to the theory that the unfinished business in such dreams is something left over from a traumatic experience or a recurring experience that is apparently sub-traumatic but 'comes back to haunt you'. In modern society, the latter is most commonly either one's educational life or one's working life, or a combination or the two. The more a human is subjected to such recurring sub-traumatic experiences, the more the human has dysfunctional dreaming.

If this is the case, the best thing to do is to write these dreams down as quickly as possible after waking, get a good editor, and either launch a TV series or a book franchise (along the lines of Paris Hotter and the Half-Assed Goblet of Philosophy, perhaps). That way, at least some good will come out of it.