Hall believed that dreams were a conceptualization of our experiences (Hall, 1953). These experiences involved our perceptions of those in our environment, as well as our ideas of our self. His Cognitive Theory of dreaming was one of the first of his time that was not consistent with Freud’s idea of “wishful thinking”. Instead, Hall believed that our dreams were a way of shaping our own ideas of the world. He believed that during dreams, we expressed creativity, similar to what we would do when expressing ourselves through metaphors in poetry(Hall, 1953).