Dreams And Psychology: The Cognitive Theory Of Dreams

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Many studies on the brain and in psychology today has proven everyone dreams. However, views on what dreams represent can vary drastically. Freud, a well known psychologist from the late 1800’s to early 1900’s, felt there was a strong relationship between dreams and the desires of the instinctual aspect of the unconscious, the id (Van de Castle, 1994). These unconscious desires could be analyzed through dreams by inspecting the manifest and latent content of the dream. Carl Jung, another well known psychologist from the Freudian time frame believed dreams were insightful to a collective unconscious. Through archetypes within the dreams and the dreams themselves humans can discover personal wholeness (Van de Castle, 1994). The most recently developed and most logical approach to dreams is called the Cognitive theory of dreams which has two branches. The dreams
The activation synthesis theory believes the electrical charges produced by the brain during REM sleep stimulate random memories. The brain’s need to make sense of the world then compiles the dream into a logical storyline. Since the dream is just random memories compiled into a logical story there is no disguised meaning within the dream. This theory best applies to my dream because the day before I had the dream I watched the movie Fresh which involved drug dealing and characters going to jail. Every person who appeared in my dream, for example my mom and my boyfriend, I either saw in person or talked to on the phone. All the memories of the day from the movie and from my interactions with my loved ones were stimulated during REM sleep by electrical charges in the brain and presented to me through my dream. Since activation synthesis does not apply a meaning to dreams but rather an explanation on why they occur it proves to be the most accurate theory of

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