most commonly reported dreams include being confronted with a test in a school when not prepared to take it; being chased; feeling paralyzed (when the REM stage overlaps with the waking stage of sleep), and involve water, people and vehicles, falling and flying, food, house chores, nudity, babies and death.
Memory theorists suggest that dreams are created by the relocation of memory storage from hippocampus (an area deep in the forebrain that helps regulate emotion, learning, and memory) to neocortex (the top layer of the brain that is divided into four major lobes: frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital; used for permanent storage of information) over time. The transfer process takes about a week.