“I have just closed my eyes again/Climbed aboard the Dream Weaver train/Driver take away my worries of today/and leave tomorrow behind.”

Every night, like in Gary Wright’s pop hit, people all over the world climb aboard the “Dream Weaver” train for a free ride on railways of fantasy - destination unknown.

Through astral planes, starry skies and to the bright side of the moon, the train may travel, but whether the train actually takes away the worries of today is doubtful.

Many doctors say dreams are actually a way of dealing with reality.

“We’re really grounded in the concrete,” said Charles McPhee, author of “Stop Sleeping Through Your Dreams: A Guide to Awakening Consciousness During Dream Sleep.”

“Dreams are a reflection of things going on in our lives. It helps you to understand your life better.”

So, in other words, the Dream Train rarely travels much farther than the sleeper’s own life experiences.

But what about strange, unrealistic dreams, complete with tidal waves and decaying teeth?

McPhee said those are often symbols, encoding the dream’s message. For example, water often represents emotions and decaying teeth often represent the dreamer’s anxiety about their appearance.

Three years ago, McPhee launched his Web site, www.dreamdoctor.com, and invited people to submit their dreams for him to interpret.

The site now gets half a million page views a month and provides McPhee, the founder and president of Dream Doctor Inc. with a full-time job - explaining dreams for the hundreds of men and women searching for interpretation.

College students commonly submit dreams to McPhee involving sex, love, careers and death, which is a symbol for change, something college students deal with often.

“The reason why being able to speak the language of dreams is valuable is because it really helps you to identify feelings and emotions that we’re currently experiencing,” he said. “The rule of thumb with dream interpretation is if you understand your dreams, you understand yourself better and if you understand yourself better, you make better decisions.

“You make better decisions, and you’re going to get to your goal faster.”

While business junior Jessica Gunden has never dreamed of her teeth falling out, she says she has a vivid dreams.

“I have very strange dreams, they’re totally off the wall,” she said. “They don’t make sense, ever.”

For several years when she was young, Gunden had a dream that happened almost every night.

“I was next door at my best friend’s house and, nobody ever remembers this, but in one episode of the Scooby Doo cartoon, the ice cream monsters - Chocolate, Vanilla and Strawberry - they were trying to (abduct) my friend and I,” she said.

Before she’s abducted, her dream instantly switches and “the school I used to go to is on fire and I’m Superwoman and I fly in and I save everybody.”

And though Gunden said she’s never had her dreams interpreted, she is interested in doing so.

But before a dream can be interpreted, it must be remembered; a task that poses problems for many.

The Dream Doctor has three tips to help remember dreams: First, learn how to wake up slowly and to concentrate on what you were dreaming. Second, keep a notepad next to your bed and write down four sentences about the dream. And finally, when you go to bed, tell yourself that you want to remember your dreams in the morning.

McPhee said he became interested in dream interpretation when he was studying at Princeton University and began having what are known as “lucid” dreams.

“Lucid dreaming is a phenomenon where, unlike most of our dreams, during a lucid dream, we’re able to recognize we’re dreaming while we’re still dreaming,” McPhee said. “They’re very well-remembered and memory for dreams is very elusive - you have a lucid dream you tend to remember it well.”

In lucid dreams, the dreamer can control the “dreamscape,” and take the dream where they want it to go.

“It offers a really spectacular view of our own subconscious minds and the process of dreaming because we can interact with the dreamscape consciously,” McPhee said.

“When they’re lucid, they act out their fantasies - they can work on problems and try to teach themselves things, like how to play a musical instrument, and they can also just learn a lot more about dreams.”

However, the control is imperfect and lucid dreamers often have a limited degree of success.

“You can try to have a hot tub with a Sports Illustrated centerfold, but the dreamscape is not always easily manipulated,” McPhee said.

Social work sophomore Jane Kilmer has been lucid dreaming for a long time, though she didn’t know it until her boyfriend’s friend told her about it a couple of years ago.

“I didn’t know there was a name to it,” she said. “I just knew that sometimes I can make myself do what I want to do in my dreams.”

She said she has lucid dreams about once a week and they usually involve stopping nightmares.

“If it’s a scary dream then I’ll all of a sudden realize I’m dreaming and that I can control it,” Kilmer said. “I’ll stop running if somebody’s chasing me and confront them.”

She hasn’t heard of many other lucid dreamers, though.

Neither has Dr. Bertram Karon, a clinical psychologist at MSU.

He is doubtful about the ability of people to control their dreams.

Karon has worked at MSU since 1962 and has taught the use of dreams in psychoanalysis and in psychotherapy to other professionals.

“Almost all psychoanalysts use dreams as one way of getting at problems and it is a helpful way because what is troubling and unconscious is often related to the dreams that people have,” he said.

He said dreams are most likely a “mechanism for keeping us asleep in the face of disturbance - if anything comes along that disturbs sleep, it almost always will provoke a dream and within limit, we stay asleep.”

For example, Karon said there have been tests done where researchers drop the mattress a person is sleeping on, and as a result, the person often dreams they are falling off a cliff or doing something else that involves falling.

“There was a point when we discovered that every once in a while during sleep there’s a change in your brain waves and your eyes rapidly move,” he said. “Back in the ’50s, we thought, ‘Wow, that must be when you’re dreaming.’”

It turns out that when people are woken up during that stage of sleep - known as REM for Rapid Eye Movement - the sleeper will be able to recall a dream 80 percent of the time, versus 20 percent of the time when woken up during other sleep stages.

But Karon said that nightmares never occur during REM stages, which is something psychologists are still trying to understand.

As for dream interpretation, Karon believes symbols can change from dreamer to dreamer.

“If you want to know what a dream is about, the only way is to get the person who had that dream to associate to the dream and that will lead you to what the dream is about,” he said.

But even with psychoanalysts like Karon and dream-interpretation Web sites like McPhee’s, most students will probably be content to just hop on the dream train every night and go wherever it takes them.

Whether that involves visions of sugar plum fairies, massive tidal waves or astral planes.