When I was younger, I would spend hours reading about dream topics while listening to the Earthbound soundtrack. The oddity of Earthbound itself and the logic-defying strangeness of the things I was viewing blended together pretty well: even today I associate some of the music with those times. I would use a program to slow the music down and add effects to make them sound even more spaced-out than they already are. 

It was a thrilling age. Dreams to me were a doorway to a mysterious realm that everyone had visited, but few had ever explored to their fullest potential. What I found most attractive was the idea of being able to consciously experience and even mold my own somatic adventures along the lines which I would dictate via lucid dreaming. It's a very ancient topic, but the modern-day practitioners- called Oneironauts after a combination of the Greek word for dream + sailor- have much more research to back up their claims. 

I was never very successful with it despite one or two minor incidents, but it's a real phenomenon. 

Like many other goings-on in the brain, why it happens at all is still speculatory at this point in time. Brain imaging in general and modern dream research are both fairly new and both closely associated with one another: it wasn't long ago at all that seeing the inside of a real human brain involved the use of a cadaver. No surprise, then, that the information we have is pretty sketchy in some respects. Toss in all of the other related advances in medical science (especially genetics) and you are going to see frequent changes in the basic assumptions of the field.

But scientists can't just sit on their hands all day despite the rapid obsolescence of certain facets of established practicum, and so they do their best for us. One thing they seem to concur on is that not a few aspects of dreaming do in fact have a genetic basis: there are many factors involved, but some people are just born to be lousy candidates for the Dream Olympics. No two brains are alike: men and women have size differences in different portions of the brain, for instance. Age factors play a part as well - honestly easier to ask what doesn't have a part. Go beyond the quantifiable into the psyche and you may as well be on the moon with Princess Luna - in some respects, things wouldn't have changed much from the time she left until the time she returned. We just don't know too much about the purely psychological/spiritual side of dreaming despite the passage of tens of centuries: it's not much of a lie to say that a priest in Ancient Mesopotamia or Egypt could give you an answer that is just as good as some of what you'll read on PubMed or Sci-Hub. I wouldn't be quick to dismiss what they had to say, either, because those men of old knew more about the human heart and its secret works than we ever will again. 

Anyway, here's a few of those Earthbound tracks I was talking about earlier.