How do dreams work?
Sigmund Freud, who is a psychologist developed the psychological discipline of psychoanalysis. He wrote a lot about dream theories and their interpretations in the early 1900s. He said dreams are manifestations of one's deepest desires and anxieties, more likely to relate in childhood repressed memories or obsessions.
Freud developed a psychological technique to interpret dreams and devised a series of guidelines to understand the symbols and motifs that appear in our dreams. In modern times, dreams have been seen as a connection to the unconscious mind. They range from normal and ordinary to overly surreal and bizarre. Dreams can have varying natures, such as being frightening, exciting, magical, melancholic, adventurous,
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Many endorse the Freudian theory of dreams – that dreams reveal insight into hidden desires and emotions. Other prominent theories include those suggesting that dreams assist in memory formation, problem solving, or simply are a product of random brain activation. The earliest recorded dreams were acquired from materials dating back approximately 5000 years, in Mesopotamia, where they were documented on clay tablets. In the Greek and Roman periods, the people believed that dreams were direct messages from deities or deceased persons, and that they predicted the future. Some cultures practiced dream incubation with the intention of cultivating dreams that are of …show more content…
“The rule of thumb with anything that happens in a dream is that everybody and everything is an aspect of you,” she says. “If you dream about your boss, for example, you’re connecting with the part of you that feels empowered. You’re owning your connection with authority figures. “If you dream about a coworker, Sullivan Walden suggests asking yourself what quality they represent. “Are they a hard worker? Creative? Fun to be around?” she asks. “What two or three adjectives would you use to describe them? Then consider that you are connecting with that part of yourself. Your subconscious is saying that you want to become more of that. “Remembering Your Dreams, we can have up to nine dreams each night, and while you don’t have to remember your dreams to benefit from them, you increase their value if you do, says Sullivan Walden. To remember your dream, don’t move around too much or immediately check your phone when you wake; this is when dreams often leave your memory. Before you get out of bed, Sullivan Walden suggests writing down your dream in a journal or recording it using an app, such as Dreams Cloud. “Don’t move a muscle until you have one scenario in mind,” she says. “Replay it several times before you get out of bed. Movement disconnects your dream and you’ll have a harder time if you wait until you get up. “Another way to remember or decipher it
One of the most common brain activities during sleep is dreaming. Scientist still to this day do not fully understand why we dream or what dreams are exactly. “Some experts suggest that dreams represent the replay of the day’s events as a critical mechanism in the formation of memories, while others claim that the content in dreams is simply the result of random activity in the brain.” It is known that visually intense dreaming occurs most commonly in the REM sleep stage. Dreaming causes the brain to become very active, and not only at displaying the images we see during our dreams.
After recording my dreams in a journal for about a week, I found that my dreams are somewhat ordinary and similar to my waking life. The dreams that are most common for me include shared topics with many other dreams that I have, people, places and events from my everyday life, and multiple experiences which happen only a short amount of time prior to having my dreams. My dreams are all similar in some ways and relate to multiple aspects of my everyday life. A few common ideas running through my dreams I have recorded in my dream journal include school, dance classes, friends, and danceline.
1. Introduction Starting from the ancient times humans has always been interested in strange phenomena of sleeping and dreams. Dreams can be explained psychologically as images of subconsciousness and feedback of neural processes in human's brain. For most of us, dreaming is something quite separate from normal life. When we wake up from being chased by a monster, or being on a date with a movie star, we realize with relief or disappointment that "it was just a dream."
Patricia Garfield, in her book Your Child’s Dreams collected 247 dreams from schoolchildren in the US and a few in India. She found that 64% of those were “bad” dreams and the remaining 36% were “good” dreams. Of the bad dreams, almost half had a theme of being chased or attacked, and in the remaining dreams about 40% had a sense of danger or some character being injured or killed, even though there was no direct threat. Of the “good” dreams, about half of the themes fell into two categories. The most frequent category was just “having a good time,” and the next was of the child receiving a gift or having some desired possessions.
“Dream interpretation” is the term used to describe the process of interpreting a dream by a dreamer (client), with the help of a therapist. Psychoanalyst uses this technique in therapy as a means of helping their clients understand themselves better. The initial and most important work on this topic has been done by three psychoanalysts: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Alfred Adler. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), is known as the father of psychology because of his vast contribution to the field of psychology. He was among the first to work extensively with dreams and to use it in therapeutic sessions.
The “why we dream argument see dreams as only nonsense that the brain creates from fragments of images and memory” (Obringer). On this side of the argument dreams are viewed as tricks of the mind that just seem to happen. Other people believe differently. Some people believe dreams have meaning even if we don’t recognize it at first. “Many think dreams are full of symbolic messages that may not be clear to us on the surface” (Obringer).
What does it mean to dream? Well, I believe dreams will always remain a mystery of phenomenons that science will never be able to explain. However, we can interpret our dreams in many different aspects. Philosophers, such as Alan Watts, interpret dreams in an interesting way, such as it being an adventure (The Dream of Life). From this, I’d like to think of dreams as adventures for our minds; we’re subconsciously wandering to a new adventure every time we decide to rest our eyes.
Dreams are your future accomplishments that you have in store for yourself. The reasons for agreeing are that we are worried about failing, we do not want to be mediocre but won 't do what it takes to be great, and if you set your goals high you can reach the small ones on the way. In addition,
Dreaming could also be seen as emotional duplication of real life experiences in one's life. Another possible reasoning for why we dream is because dreams are highly essential reflections of unconscious mental functioning. With an experience of the present, processing of the past, and arrangement for the future, are uncommon state of consciousness that incorporates
Finally, a big part of Freud 's claim is that the unconscious mind governs our behavior. He would say that dreams can provide insight to our personality and believes “every dream represents a wish fulfillment. Dreams are representative of the imaginary fulfillment of a wish or impulse in early childhood, before such wishes have been repressed” (Doyle). So for instance, if I had a dream about becoming a famous artist Freud would say that this could give insight into my personality. He might argue, that my hidden passions and desires such as becoming an artist become more prominent in the unconscious state of awareness.
The late Tupac Shakur said, "Reality is wrong. Dreams are for real". This is a profound statement when you think of the perspectives of Freud and Jung. To many, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud are considered the fathers of dream interpretation. Freud believed that dreams are filled with symbols, that nothing we do is by chance, and that the symbolism in our dreams helps to dictate our actions.
There have been many times in my life where I have either woken up in the middle of the night from a horrible nightmare or woke up in the morning trying to recall my dreams. I have spent a lot of time researching what my dreams mean. Although we have experienced countless dreams in our lifetime, do we ever stop to think: how dreams occur? How dreams affect our lives? Do dreams even mean anything?
According to Freud, dreams are a way to look into our soul, to unlock our unconscious. Our unconscious holds childhood wishes
These are four possible dream meanings: 1. You have an inner desire to renew your vows. 2.
To define sleep, we could say that it is a process of renewal for the body. Scientists still don't have an explanation for why we should sleep, but for sure they know that sleep is not 'switch off' case for the body. They know that sleep is an essential for many physiological processes, as consolidation of memories. On average, people spend a third of their lives in sleep and that is an evidence for the importance of sleep for us. There are many explanations for sleeping process and what is happening to us during it, but most of them are spiritual and religious explanations.