According to Harvard researchers, a "slumber switch" buried in the brain slips an alert mind

into deep and restful sleep. In a experiment with rats, brain researchers found that during sleep
most of the nerve cells of brain are turned off by some signal sent out by a group of cells in the
hypothalamus. Dreams may reflect a fundamental aspect of mammalian memory processing.
Crucial information acquired during the waking state may be reprocessed during sleep. Based
on the recent findings of Jonathan Winson and other neuroscientific laboratories dreams are
indeed meaningful. Studies of the hippocampus (a brain structure crucial to memory), of rapid
eye movement (REM) sleep and of a brain wave called theta rhytm suggest that dreaming
reflects a pivotal aspect of the processing of memory.

In other cultures, have interpreted dreams as inspirational, curative or alternative reality.

During the past century, scientist have offered conflicting psychological and neuroscientific
explanations for dreams. In 1900, with the publication of "The Interpretation of Dreams",
Sigmund Freud proposed that dreams were the "royal road" to the unconscious, that they
revealed in disguised from the deepest elements of an individual's inner life. This theory means
that dreams are a by product of the dreamer's physical and mental state during sleep,
distinguishes between manifest and latent dream and points out that the dream work proposed
by Sigmund Freud is actually a result of information processing and self-organization in the
sleeping brain.
References

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/

https://apnews.com/article/6e4d94f7fea62905bff98015936c5a03