PBS’s, Nova What Are Dreams, is a forty-five-minute documentary about how different stages of sleep effect our dreams. Throughout the documentary, we also witness how dreaming is essential for making sense of the world around us. For nearly a century, many thought when one is asleep the brain is asleep as well. Yet not until technology advanced, did scientists begin examining sleeping patients to notice every ninety minutes their patients brain showed activity as if they were awake but were still unconscious.
Dreams draw people’s attention.. it makes people curious. It makes others want to take part and help. Other people who see someone so passionate about something get inspired and drawn in. Dreams can be wonderful or dreams can be horrible.
Dreams can either consist of what someone wants to happen or what they wish won’t happen at least that’s what Freud is stating. In Joan Seaman and Tom Philbin’s book “The New American Dream Dictionary: The Complete Language of Dreams in Easy-To-Understand Form", they touch upon what Carl Jung believes dreams mean. When he states “for Jung, dreams symbolize more…they reveal many other aspects of the dreamer’s search for meaning.(43)” Jung a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who has also done research in the field of dreams like Freud has similar thought on Freud’s point which gives way to a strong support by Jung .
According to the Activation-synthesis theory, REM sleep triggers neural activity that evokes random visual memories, which our sleeping brain weaves into stories. According to the Cognitive development theory, dream content reflects a dreamers' cognitive development-their knowledge and understanding.
Everyone dreams. It is simply a fact of science. From the day one is born until the day he dies, he will dream. Not ambitiously but literally. Dreams occur during the REM stage of sleep because that is where the brain is most active.
The different theories of dreaming according to Exploring Psychology Ninth edition by David G Myers are wish fulfillment ,information processing ,physiological function ,neural activation ,and cognitive development. As you can see there are quite a few. Starting with wish fulfillment. Or to satisfy our own wishes. The theory thought of by Sigmund Freud in his book The Interpretation of dreams, releases back in the 1900's.
The article “The Science Behind Dreaming” from Scientific American by Sander van der Linden, gave us a little insight on why we dream. On average, you experience around 150,000 normal dreams by the age of 70. This does not include the occasional nightmare. There is no proven fact on why we dream what we dream. However, there were and still are a lot of theorists out there that believe our sub-conscious dreams are connected to our unconscious wishes.
It involves many brain structures that are also functioning while a person is awake. This research has been going on for a while and dates back to the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud. Freud was passionate about the unconscious and he concluded that the unconscious processes motivate every behavior, thought, and feeling. This included dreaming behaviors as well. Freud studied dreams and determined that dreams are fulfillments of wishes.
Abstract Everybody dreams and sleeps and the mind plays an important role on this, so by understanding why we dream we thereby understand the psychological nature of dreaming. From understanding dreaming we can then understanding the meaning of these dreams; whether they have no meaning or as Freud (date) believed they show an insight into the deeper desires of the dreamer stemming from the suppressed Id. Although Freud’s theory on dream has recently been discredited by (people) instead indicating that dreams have no deeper meaning and are just brain pulses. It then begs the question of why, as Hall (date) and Hall et al (date) showed a high rate of dreams surrounding everyday life and the majority of dreams are nightmares.
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.
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 A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. The content and purpose of dreams are not fully understood, though they have been a topic of scientific speculation, as well as a subject of philosophical and religious interest, throughout recorded history. Dream interpretation is the attempt at drawing meaning from dreams and searching for an underlying message. The scientific study of dreams is called oneirology.
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).
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."
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?
