Is there any evolutionary purpose for them or are they just random thoughts?

In one sense, it is useful to think of sleeping as the antithesis of waking. This intuition is
ancient and flawed, but it should not be ignored either. In waking life, we experience a
distinctly partitioned inner and outer world, while in dreams we find ourselves in a
world of embodied inner experience. As the Sun is to the Moon, intense, sustained
consciousness during the day is counterbalanced by gentle phasing in and out of semi-
consciousness and unconsciousness in sleep. Instead of literal, logical narratives, dreams
bring us many figurative modes ranging from the profoundly insightful or even prescient
to the absurd and nonsensical.

In a more scientific sense, but still keeping with the antithesis model, the dream process
may be like a kind of defrag or maintenance routine of the brain. I don't know to what
extent this speculation is supported by neurology (to my recollection the last explanation
I heard was that dreams were something like low level neurological noise being fed back
into higher level interpretive regions of the brain). I suspect a combination of the two.

Sort of like one of those wax tablets with the plastic sheet on top - during the day we etch
grooves with a stylus of our attention, which binds the sheet of short term memory to the
wax of our psyche. At night, it is as if the sheet is peeled back to free up the associations
and free up our memory. As it peels back, the disassociation is experienced semi-
consciously under safely paralyzed conditions. It is a physiological process of super-
saturated forgetting which we experience as a fugue of psychic content on many levels. It
is interesting to note that unlike waking consciousness, our dream consciousness draws
from many different times and places real and imagined without prejudice. Characters
too are featured out of time and context, sometimes shifting identities without notice.
It's a bit like wringing out a psychological sponge which retains the residues of a lifetime
of signifying events. A neurochemical rinse which pops out the kinked up peptides.

I find it hard to entertain any completely mechanistic explanation of dreams, because it

seems unlikely, but a couple of possibilities might include some kind of automatic
generation of unlikely survival strategies. Absurdities encountered in dreams may be the
equivalent of running every possible solution to sets of computations which are cached
long term in the brain. It could also be possible that the jumbled up deep-brain
associative experience of dreams is a more fertile medium for certain kinds of insights
that linear pre-frontal cortex driven thought tends to block. In this case, dreams and
dream specialists such as shamans make sense evolutionarily at the anthropological level
- providing the tribe with opportunities for non-ordinary leaps of logic but represented
in way to limit the influence to a harmless level. kjb

The most skeptical of materialists may insist that even this is too magical, and that
dreams can only be nonsense which only coincidentally seems to make sense sometimes.
This view is really the inverse of the Freudian, Jungian, and traditional ideas of dreams
as revealing of profound personal and universal truths. To the former, I would point to
famous dreams which have influenced history.

To the latter I would point out that on some level, dreams can be seen as experience
which our psyche has deemed literally not worth remembering. Behind all of the
metaphors and archetypes, the self is ultimately a cosmic test pattern which signifies
only its own significance.

Are they hormonal or more cognitive based?

I don't think hormonal or cognitive is really the right distinction to make, but I think the
gist here is about whether dreams are driven by what is on your mind or what is in your
brain. Just like waking consciousness, it's both. A push pull. I think dreams present
more of an opportunity for deep-brain neurochemistry to go off-leash. No pesky social
inhibitions or physics to get in the way, so something that might be only slightly
disturbing in waking life can build up a big head of neurological steam as a nightmare.
Generally I would say that physiology tends to drive dreaming more than cognition.
Eating too much or too late is commonly thought to have an effect on dreams, and I have
noticed myself that being cold or uncomfortable seems to cause me to have dreams
which wake me up.

Can people actually control their dreams or is it just an illusion of control?

Sometimes it seems like you can control your dreams to some extent, and sometimes
that control turns out to have limitations or to evaporate entirely. In the context of a
dream it isn't clear what would constitute an 'illusion'. There is a fair amount of interest
in lucid dreaming techniques. I don't see any particular reason why those techniques
would all be invalid.

According to me dreams are an abstract "detensioning" of your brain's built up

inconsistencies. The brain unloads and reconnects essential information this way,
because from it's nature it searches for a balance.

"Meaning" as rational human thought is only one way our brain organizes information.
In dreaming the brain combines things - pathways to create links that are needed in
order for the person to keep it's psychological (and maybe physiological) integrity.

One can learn to have a lot of control in dreams - you can learn to choose what happens,
to make choices while dreaming, to shapeshift yourself and your environment. This is
called lucid dreaming.