Dreams
DreamsDreams
A high school athlete can dream of advancing their career to college, or even professionally. A filthy rich man can dream he is poor and living in the slums. Author Naomi Epel believes that "Your unconscious knows things your conscious doesn't. It can be an alley with new insights" (Von Kreisler 143).
According to recent research, most dreams have been described as distorted reflections of our daily lives. They do not necessarily have to be symbolic pictures or unconscious wishes, as Freud believed, or random images caused by brain signals. Experts now believe that dreams are so closely related to our waking lives that we can use them to help organize and work out inner conflicts (Von Keisler 141). A Harvard neuroscientist, Robert Stickgold, Ph.D. and his colleague J. Allen Hobson, M.D. have created a new model of dreaming. Numerous sections of the brain aid in dreaming, but they have concluded that it is a bottom-up process which is triggered by a region called the pontine brain stem, or pons. These pons, referred to as FTG's, or gigantocellular field of the tegmentum, begin to aid in the dreaming process when the brain goes into REM sleep. REM is referred to as rapid eye movement ("How to Build...").
In order for people to dream, they must be in a period of rest which they lose awareness of their surroundings. This is more commonly known as sleep. Once a person has fallen asleep, they will enter into the first of five stages of sleep. Stages one through four are usually termed as non-REM sleep with stages three and four also being referred to as delta sleep, due to the evidence of low frequency brain waves. It is said that non-REM sleep makes up about 80% of sleep and REM sleep makes up the remaining 20%. Stage one lasts around seven minutes. This stage is a time when the brain produces alpha waves as we are going from being awake to sleep (Dream Talk). Stages two through four are periods in which the dreamer falls deeper and deeper into sleep. Declining during this time are the dreamer's muscle tension, heart rate, respiration, and body temperature. Stage four is the deepest stage of sleep and this is where sleepwalking and night terror occur in children. Neither of these occurrences are remembered. The fifth stage is the REM sleep and this occurs approximately an hour and a half from the time you fall asleep. The REM stage is also referred to as Paradoxical Sleep because the body is in a state of physiological arousal. In this stage, the brain is highly active and this causes REM (Dream Talk). According to Robert Stickgold, Ph.D., "The mind becomes clinically insane for two hours every night. We hallucinate wildly, see and hear things that aren't there. We become delusional" ("How to Build..."). The brain will also produce fast frequency, low amplitude beta that are normally produced when a person is awake. Since the waves produced during sleep are identical to those while you are fully awake, your heart rate, oxygen consumption, breathing, and eye movement are also identical. The only thing that is affected is the muscle tension in the neck and limbs. Throughout an eight hour night, the mind will cycle through the five stages between five and six times. The pattern would look like this: Stage 1...Stage 2...Stage 3...Stage 4...Stage 3...Stage 2...Stage 5 (REM)...Stage 2...Stage 3...Stage 4...Stage 3...Stage 2...Stage 5 (REM)...etc. It has been reported in sleep studies, that 80% of people awakened from REM sleep were dreaming (Dream Talk).
What determines the content of your dreams? According to Dr. Stickgold, all dreams are given, or assigned an emotion. This emotion has to be established before the dream can develop a plot, characters, or a setting. Those signals reach one of the brain's emotional centers which "chooses" a mood or emotion. It is not yet known exactly how the emotion is picked at this time ("How to Build...").
Age has also proved to be a component of dream content. Research shows that small children are scared easily so they dream mainly of animals and monsters that chase and attack them. Teenagers dream of romance and sex. Adults between the ages of 21 and 34 more often than not have dreams of moral issues. They are at a stage in their life where they need to make decisions about careers, marriage, and life direction are of major importance to them. Adults ranging from age 35 to 49 dream that since they have obtained some of their life goals and issues, they tend to avoid hostility towards others. Adults over the age of 65 are preoccupied with the loss of resources and anxiety about aging (Von Kreisler 143).
There is also a difference in dreams between male and females. Research has proven that the difference is due in part to biology and social conditioning. There was a study performed on 1000 people, half male and half female. Men tended to have action-oriented dreams that dealt with strangers, their own occupations, and unfamiliar outdoor surroundings (Von Kreisler 141). Women tended to dream about emotional struggles with loved ones and indoor surroundings. Women who stay in the home mainly have dreams about children, whereas those that are working dream more about bosses and colleagues. However, statistics show that about one-third of all dreams are dominated by fear and anxiety, and 15% involve anger (Von Kreisler 142).
One of the hardest parts of dreams is remembering them. One of the best things you can do is to expect to remember your dreams before you even go to sleep. You can also review the days events. Upon waking, follow your dream backwards and try to remember as much as possible. Then you have to write the dream down before you forget. You can also do this during the night if you happen to wake up (Dream Recall).
Research has discovered many interesting things about dreams. Most people dream in color and the dreams usually involve motion and action. Dreams are visual in nature and often don't use taste, smell, and touch. The length of dreams will always vary, but most last as long as a daydream would last. Dreams do not only occur during REM, but it is possible to dream during a short nap (Dream Talk).
Sigmund Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis and studied dreams very seriously. Freud and his colleagues believed that dreams were vital keys to unlocking the mysteries of an individual's personality. He first used the term "interpretation" to refer to the unscrambling of dream content. Freud wrote a book called The Interpretation of Dreams in which he described the Freudian Dream Theory. Some points of this theory include that dreams are not meaningless or random events. He also stated that all dream have a cause which come from a life event. The content of most dreams is made up of sex, aggression, wish fulfillment and childhood memories. There are also more points that make up Freud's Dream Theory (Dream Talk).
According to Freud, dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. But today researchers are saying that dreams have no inherent meaning, just lots of emotion. Freud believed that dreaming was a time away from the waking self in which your innermost thoughts and feelings could be liberated. Now it's believed that "semi-random neuronal firings" are the cause of what you see and dream in your dreams ("How to Build...").