Sleep and Dreams By the time a person is 25 years old they have fallen asleep 9,000 times and have spent close to 72,000 hours asleep (Plotnik & Kouyoumdjian, 2014). A person enters an altered stage of consciousness every night when they go to bed. Sleep consists of different stages that involve different levels of responsiveness, consciousness, and awareness. Dreaming is a state of consciousness in which a person is asleep but experience visual or auditory images. Sleep When a person is asleep their brain actually is not, the brain is active throughout the night. To track the brain’s activity researchers would attach wires to a person’s scalp and track the brain activity through each stage of sleep. There are four stages of sleep. The …show more content…
One of the biggest breakthroughs was that about 80%-90% of the times when people were awakened from the REM period they reported having vivid, long dreams (Plotnik & Kouyoumdjian, 2014). According to Sigmund Freud, a person’s dream represents a wish fulfillment. Dreams represent their unconsciousness wishes while asleep. Freud says that a person dreams because they cannot fulfill what they want when they are awake (Smith, 2003). Drugs and alcohol may affect sleep, as well as certain sleeping disorders. Dreams help people in everyday situations because of its ability to help problem solve and creativity (Breus, 2015). People claim they do not dream, but they actually do. Everyone dreams it is just the matter of remembering the dream they have. Activation-Synthesis Theory says that dreams occur because the brain areas provide reasoned cognitive control during the waking state are shut down. Hobson thought this theory was better than Freud’s. Unlike Freud he thought that dream interpretation is questionable, since dreams can just be random thoughts. Some people experience violent dreams. Scientists call this the threat simulation theory. This theory suggests that violent dreams can be a warning sign for brain disorders, including Parkinson’s disease and dementia (Bryner,