Where Do Dreams Come From and Why?

Dreams come from your soul and are intended to help you progress along your life path. In sleep the focus of the physical world and the body is on hold and during this period your soul has a perfect opportunity to dialogue with your conscious mind... or so it would appear. The problem here is that the subconscious never sleeps. Think of the subconscious like a faithful dog always on guard to protect its master. Your soul asks the conscious mind to make a change to some aspect of functioning in order to avoid a particular undesirable outcome. Let's take a very common example. Say your soul wants you to be less analytical / rational in your approach to life and to incorporate intuition / feelings into the decision making process. It dispatches a dream for this purpose. Ideally the dream is received and your conscious mind accepts the direction of your soul and begins a program to change in this direction. The more likely outcome, however, is that your subconscious mind asserts itself in the dream and provides all sorts of reasons why this change should be avoided. Due to this, the message / request in the dream is effectively spoiled.
Why does this happen? What gain does the subconscious make from this? The simple answer is that there is no gain but the subconscious still retains control in the area which was being addressed. The subconscious mind is being helpful as far as it is concerned and sees the reasons it provides for avoiding the change as valid. Drawing on your personal experience as evidence it will tell you "When you are open to your feelings you are open to being hurt, rejected and ignored. You'll end up sad and depressed." In this way it appears to protect you from reliving pain from the past.
The price for this protection is very high. Life is about increasing your awareness. Awareness is gained directly through eliminating the control the subconscious mind has in areas of your life. Awareness cannot be transferred intellectually. You cannot read something and become aware. However, you can read and then be more prepared to accept opportunities to eliminate subconscious control when they present themselves.
A very simple example from my life is how closed minded I was to any ideas outside the sphere of science. I immediately classed as idiot anyone who spoke of things beyond the physical. I was so sure of my conviction that I was unaware that my subconscious mind was in control - 'protecting me'. As long as I continued with that attitude I learned nothing. I was very fortunate to have been put in a position where I faced my fears head on. At the time I did not welcome it and in fact feared for my life. I didn't want to see spirit people walking around but there they were! I was so fearful of the very thing that I had proclaimed did not exist. Through my experiences I learned much about spirits and how my fear of them had no basis in fact. From spirits I have learned much about what I am - what we are. From childhood I always had a fear of the dark and slept with some light on in the room - even though I didn't believe anything was in the room with me. Ironically, since seeing spirits I now sleep with the light off and am comforted by the fact that they are there. The experience helped me to open my mind.
Most of us allow our subconscious free reign in many areas of our lives. Life shows us where these areas lie and helps us weed out that control. Our dreams support this endeavor by showing the causes and effects of our subconscious conditioning. Typically dreams show what event first caused us to act in a particular way. Then they show how we still re-act today due to the ongoing effects of that event. Lastly they show us how to change for the better. Dreams often bring us back to childhood as the time of our conditioning. As children we take on board everything about our parents. We see them as infallible and wanting to be so much like them we adopt their ways of behaving - both good and bad. At appropriate times in our lives our dreams select a negative aspect of our conditioning and ask us to eliminate it - thus reducing the control of the subconscious and increasing our awareness. In this way we are helped to achieve our life purpose.