Dreams are a very ponderous things. Simply saying, dreams are a stream of images, sounds, and
the actions of something; like a movie. But never have dreams been able to be explained. The
Greeks and Romans claimed that dreams were signs from their gods and had prophetic magic
(www.scientificamerican.com). Even though the purpose of dreams has not been discovered, a
huge movement in the study of dreams occurred at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1952,
scientists in Chicago discovered electrical readings during a certain stage of sleep. When woken
up in this stage, people almost always remember their dreams. This stage is the only stage of
sleep where we dream, and it is known as the REM stage (YouTube.com).
During the REM stage your brain acts as if it is awake, with a small difference. Chemicals, such
as norepinephrine, serotonin, and histamine, are blocked. This causes your body to become
paralyzed so that you do not act out your dreams. With this being said, it is possible to wake
suddenly not being able to move because your body has not stopped blocking chemicals from
entering your system. The REM stage is the deepest sleep stage. In this stage your heart rate and
breathing become inconsistent. REM sleep is very important, even though it only takes up about
25% of your sleep cycle. Without REM sleep, your body is tired and cannot remember things.
Your body, even though it is paralysed in this stage, relaxes. REM sleep is vital for the body,
even though the exact reason is not known. Without it not being known, it affects the theories of
why we dream. (YouTube.com)
There are many theories on why we dream. Some of them fall into the religious aspect of
things, but most are...
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...association
between emotion and symbol help the brain recognize the emotions and weave them into
our personal history.Ultimately, this hypothesis brings us back to the storytelling
component of dreams. We seem to use these bizarre images and ideas to make sense of
the day's events, to turn random neural firing into something coherent, and even to figure
out how we should feel about what's happened to us. There is no doubt that dreams play a
major role in our thought processes. The question remains, however: Are they an
evolutionary adaptation, or just an uncanny accident? (10 theories that explain why we dream)
Whether it is believed to be a distraction or an adaptation, dreams are still a mystery.
Scientists and society may ponder on the interpretations of their meanings and origins
until the end of time. Until then, we will just keep dreaming!
In the early 1900s, Sigmund Freud proposed that dreams serve as a gateway between a dreamers’ conscious and his subconscious thoughts (Mccurdy, 1946). Many ideas and information were condensed into a single dream. The dream displaced important parts and insignificant parts of the dream to confuse the dreamer. Certain objects would be introduced into the dream to symbolize the embryonic substance of the dream (Sprengnether, 2003). The dreamer would then comprehend the dream, thus generating the content of th...
A common definition of dreams according to “Patterns for College Writing” is “the symbolic representation of mental states”, but this sparse definition does not begin to encompass the complex mechanisms behind dreams and its effects on human culture around the globe. Dreams have long been the topics of folklore and urban legends. Since human beginnings, people have sought to uncover the origin of dreams. The ancient Greeks believed dreams came from the God Oneiroi. The Chinese believes that dreams happened when the hun or spirit leaves the body for the land of the dead. The Ishi Indians believed that dreams were sacred messages from the Gods. Yet even now, with the current technological and intellectual advancements, scientists and psychoanalysts have still to find the true reasons and meanings of these dreams. Some argue that dreams are the products of overactive subconscious minds while others argue that dreams are solely randomized emotions from the limbic system during sleep. Despite these contrasting theories, the truth of the matter is that the topic of dreams and the reasons behind them remain a mystery.
So for an average sleep time of eight to ten hours, we go through this sleep cycle four to five times a night. In stage one of the sleep phases, we are in a light sleep that lasts anywhere from five to ten minutes. In this stage, our eyes are still moving slowly and our muscles are slowing down, but may still have sudden muscle contractions like as if we were being startled or as if we were falling down. People in this phase may not feel rested if they are awakened, and might not of felt like they were even asleep at all. In stage two of the sleep cycle, you have successfully fallen into a light sleep. During this cycle your heart rate has slowed down, and your body temperature has dropped. You no longer have eye movement, and your body is finally resting the parts it has used through out the day. The next stage, which is stage three is also combined with stage four of the sleep cycle. These two cycles together are known as the delta sleep or the deep sleep stage, and is a very important part of the sleep cycle. During these cycles your body repairs and re-grows tissue, strengthens the immune system and builds bone and muscle. In these cycle it may be very hard to wake a person up, and if woken they may feel droggy or “out of it” for several minutes. In these stages is when most people have night terrors, experience sleep walking, or sleep talking occurs. In an adults average time of sleep this takes up about fifteen to twenty five percent of the time of sleep. Lastly, there is the REM cycle, which is also known as paradoxical sleep. During this cycle is when most of your muscles are paralyzed, your eyes are moving rapidly, and your breathing, heart rate and body temperature are not regulated. Vital signs show that during this stage, the arousal and oxygen levels
The history of dreaming began in the early centuries. “Dreams were often considered prophetic” (Comptons by Britannica). That means that dreams were seen as a message from the gods. Thousands of years ago, “Greek sick people slept in temples in order to receive dreams that would heal them” (Kantrowitz, Babara; Springen Karen). Current dream science started at the end of the 19th century. Dreams were seen as a kind of “desires” (Kantrowitz; Springen) stemming from childhood. Scientists still don’t know for sure why we are dreaming and what are dreams made of; howe...
The mind is taking past elements and combining them into one; making a narrative from the id. With condensation of themes in a dream there is a result representing more than one symbol in the dream. Along with condensation in the dream-work process is displacement. Displacement has the power of thought through the latent content converting into manifest content. Freud defines displacement as, “It is the process of displacement which is chiefly responsible for our being unusable to discover or recognize the dream-thoughts in the dream-content…” (Freud 157).
During prescientific days, dreams were interpreted as ‘manifestations’ of a ‘higher power’. Since the introduction of psychology, dreams have had 4 distinct interpretations. The first interprets dreams as a “liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature”. The second interprets dreams as “accidental disturbances from ‘internal organs’. The third interprets dreams as a foretelling of the future. The last interpretation is Freud’s. He interprets dream as an expression of subconscious desires.
In this paper I hope to open a window to the vast and mysterious world of dreaming. To most people, information about dreams isn’t common knowledge. In researching this subject though, I found that everybody has and reacts to dreams, which are vital to your mental health. You will also find how you can affect your dreams and how they affect you.
The first cultures to classify different types of dreams were the Babylonians and Assyrians. As stated by Amy Coy, creator of worldofdreamssymbols.com, to them, there were two types of dreams: good and bad. Good dreams were dreams that were sent from the gods, and that bad dreams were from evil and demons. They also believed that dreams have predictive power of sending omens or prophecies to people about the future.
First, let examined the definition of dream according to Sigmund Freud “dream is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish. Dreams are constructed like a neurotic symptom: they are compromises between the demands of a repressed impulse and the resistance of a censoring force in the ego” (Freud, 28). This simple means that all dreams represent the fulfilment of a wish by the dreamer. Dreams are the mind way of keeping an individual asleep and to digest and work out all that we have going on inside our brains, the negative, positive, fear and unclear thoughts and actions. This set the framework for dream work. Freud also stresses that even anxiety dreams and nightmares are expressions of unconscious desire. Freud further went on to say that, “the general function of dreaming is to fending off, by a kind of soothing action, external or internal stimuli which would tend to arose the sleeper, and thus of securing sleep against interpretation” (Freud, 28). With this, it shows that a dreamer can take apart his dream and analysis it, if he or she remembers, once conscious.
Despite the large amount of time we spend asleep, surprisingly little is actually known about sleeping and dreaming. Much has been imagined, however. Over history, sleep has been conceived as the space of the soul, as a state of absence akin to death, as a virtual or alternate reality, and more recently, as a form of (sub)consciousness in which memories are built and erased. The significance attributed to dreams has varied widely as well. The Ancient Greeks had surprise dream encounters with their gods. Native Americans turned to their dreams for guidance in life. Shamans dreamed in order to gather information from the spirits.
Hall categorizes dreams into five principles. The first is concepts of self which refers the number and type of roles one plays in their dreams. The second concept is of other people. This mentions the roles others play in one’s dream and how one interact with them. Concepts of the world is the third principle. This represents the dreams surrounding and landscape. Hall believes that this concept describes how one views the world. The fourth is the concepts of impulses, prohibitions, and penalties. This concept refers to the way behavior is governed by both impulses and punishments. The last concept is the concepts of problems and conflicts. This concept symbolizes ones struggles and difficulties of the waking life. Hall believes that by utilizing all five concepts, one is able to evaluate dream content and better understand the unconscious mind (Dream Theories,
Since the beginning of time, people have been trying to understand the different functions of the human body, how we move, talk, act, and for the most part many of these physiological behaviors have been explained on some level. However, one area of the human body that has had researchers and scientist confused for a long time is the mind. Many things go on inside the mind that don’t make sense and so far have no tangible explanation of why it occurs and how. One of the most fascinating and mysterious sections of psychology is that of dreaming. We dream thousands of dreams every night, but why and what do they mean?
Dreaming is the series of visualizations or feelings during a period of time when you are asleep. It is a form of thinking...
What is a dream? Why do we have dreams? Do dreams have deeper meaning in our lives? The answers to these questions have eluded and intrigued many psychologists throughout history and have sparked my interest as well. As an avid and vivid dreamer I have often found myself wondering what the true meanings to my dreams were. So what are dreams? “Strictly speaking, dreams are images and imagery, thoughts, sounds and voices, and subjective sensations experienced when we sleep.”1 Even after thousands of years of research, psychologists have still not come to an agreed answer on why we dream. There are as many opinions out there as there are individual dreams. Some psychologists believe dreaming is simply the minds way of distracting itself from outside information during sleep to allow people to get deep rest. Others such as Dr. Eric Hartman suggest dreams serve almost as a psychotherapy in which the brain can make connections between different emotions and thoughts in a safe protected environment. Do dreams have any direct correlation to everyday events and experiences? Are they meant to aid individuals in understanding and interpreting their world around them?
As the body sleeps, reality becomes replaced with the dream world, a fanciful place where the innermost being is found cowering like a creature vying to be freed. Some people have vivid dreams that are life-like; others cannot recall having dreamed. One concept is for sure, the dream world is one where the mind runs a free course. Images buried deep inside, thoughts avoided throughout the day, and unrealistic situations take hold. These images may turn into a peaceful dream of amazement and wonder, or they may take a frightening turn, dragging the mind into a state of horror and dread. The situations can become all too real, grasping at the outer edges of the mind, pushing the dream over the boundaries the body normally allows.