Psychology 290 Signature Assignment Why Do Infants Dream? Dalton Muth West Coast University Abstract Sleeping is a necessity for all humans and is especially essential during the time of infancy. These infants spend an average amount of eighteen hours a day sleeping in which half of these hours are spent in a specific sleep state known as REM, or rapid eye movement. We identify REM as the stage of sleep in older children and adults in which we begin to dream, however we usually sleep an average of eight hours a night in which 2 hours we spend in REM, that’s a major difference. There has been much speculation to why we dream in the first place, but infancy is a whole new set of curiosity, since it is still unknown for …show more content…
One thing all people have in common is that we all need sleep, it is a necessity. One particular and peculiar part of sleep has brought upon many questions that still to this day are being uncovered and baffling scientists as well as psychologists. One thing for certain is that we all have had dreams that are extremely vague or so clear it feels like real life; they can be happy or send such a fright that it can jolt you awake and cause you to think of why you had that dream because it was so confusing or …show more content…
Within his book “The Interpretation of Dreams,” he describes two aspects of dreams that he called: manifest content and latent content. The manifest content was basically what you perceived during the dream, which was the actual dream made up of: images, thoughts, and the overall content; while the latent content basically was the hidden meaning that Freud believed to be our deepest thoughts that showed to be the deeper psychological meaning. (Cherry,