Activation Synthesis Theory Of Dreams Essay

There has never been an exact answer as to why people experience seemingly random series of images, thoughts, and sensations in their sleep. People have been dreaming since the beginning of time, but for some reason, nobody has figured out why the human’s brains are so active, even in their sleep. Dreams can be essentially anything, from dreaming about falling to dreaming about being a princess. Although, dreams seem harmless they can be a problem for some, as they can take the form of nightmares, and affect individual’s sleeping habits. Several theories about dreaming have been developed over the past hundreds of years. Two of the most common theories about dreaming include Freud’s theory that dreams are a form of wish fulfillment, and the activation-synthesis hypothesis. As Freud worked with his patients, he believed that examining the symbolism of the events in their dreams would allow him to see what their problems were, because he believe their problems stemmed from events from their childhood they had buried in their unconscious mind ( Theory:

In 1977 J. Allan Hobson and Robert McClarley proposed this theory that states, when circuits are activated in the brain during REM sleep, areas of the limbic system involved in sensations, emotions, and memories, including the amygdala and the hippocampus, also become active. Then, the brain will synthesize and interpret the internal activity and try to find the meaning of the signals which then results in dreams ( Ciccarelli, S. K., White, J. N. 2015). The activation-synthesis hypothesis says that dreams are subjective to different interpretations of the signals that the brain generates during sleep (Cherry, K. 2016, September 1). The theory suggests that dreams are strictly results of the internal signals, but Hobson, one of the hypotheses creators, actually believed that this does not mean dreams are meaningless because, as he