I would check out the new special edition magazine from Scientific American called "The Hidden Mind" available here:
Scientific American many other interesting articles here also. Its funny because I was reading the article on the meaning of dreams only this morning. Lucky for you I have a copy of it, here are some key points from the article:
1) Freud proposed that dreams were the "royal road" to the unconscious and that they revealed in disguised form the deepest elements of an individual's inner life.
2)More recently dreams have been characterized as meaningless, the result of random nerve cell activity.
3) Dreams now appear to be the record of basic mammalian memory process the means by which animals form strategies for survival and evaluate current experience in light of those strategies.
4) Theorists abandoned Freud following neurological discoveries. Dreaming consists of associations and memories elicited from the forebrain in response to random signals from the brain stem. Dreams were merely the "best fit" the forebrain could provide to the random bombardment from the brain stem. Although dreams might at times appear to have psychological content, their bizarreness was inherently meaningless.
5) Other new developments indicate dreams are a form of memory processing and organization.
The magazine is very technical and sometimes hard to understand but it debunks myths like no other and thoroughly explains experiments and conclusions used to form theories (in this particular issue, about the mind). Definitley check out this issue.
