As you may know, Sigmund Freud was one of the first people to discuss the purpose of dreaming in detail, and his perspective dominated work on dreaming for many years. According to Freud, most of our behavior centers around basic sexual and aggressive impulses that have to be fulfilled if people are to be healthy and happy. But because society constrains us from acting on these impulses, and people find the idea that they are a seething cauldron of sex and aggression disturbing, they push awareness of these urges out of their conscious mind.
But, Freud thought that these wishes and desires still needed to be expressed somehow, so they show up in our dreams. While Freud was a smart and creative fellow, decades of research about dreaming have failed to support his views of dreaming.
Learn more about why we have such a wide variety of emotions. In approaching the question of why we dream, modern researchers suggest that we should distinguish between the brain activity that occurs during REM sleep and the content of the dreams that we have. This particular stage of sleep seems to do something necessary for well-being and survival because animals that are deprived of REM sleep—by waking them up every time they enter the REM state—become very disturbed and may eventually die.
Before we knew that people dream mostly during a special stage of sleep, researchers had to rely mostly on people reporting their dreams when they woke up in the morning. The dreams that they do remember in the morning may tend to be the most bizarre, disturbing, or vivid ones.
Just asking people to recall their dreams in the morning misses a lot of dreams. But once REM sleep was discovered, sleep researchers could wake people up during REM and almost always get a report of a dream in progress. In some studies, people have been shown frightening or emotional movies just before falling asleep, and in other studies, researchers have presented stimuli to people who were presently asleep and in REM. Even so, the occasions on which people do incorporate stimuli in their environment into their dreams are interesting because they show how quickly and ingeniously the brain fits those stimuli into dreams that are already in progress.
This ability to incorporate incoming information into a dream shows that the brain is functioning at a very high and flexible level during REM sleep. Certain circuits in the brain become activated during REM sleep. Then, higher areas of the brain try to interpret this activity and find meaning in it.
Many researchers have identified a close relationship between dreams and emotions e. For instance, Reiser noted that images serving as nodal points in an individual's memory network are connected by similar types of affect, indicating that affect plays an essential role in memory organization.
Reiser further conjectured that strong affect during sleep evokes existing images that are loaded with similar affect and hence activate relevant earlier experiences to form a dream.
Hartmann b stated that combinations of dream elements are not random but rather guided by emotion; accordingly, dreams are helpful for building and rebuilding an individual's emotional memory system. In brief, emotions likely play the role of order parameters: they control and guide combinations of dream elements. Emotions can therefore serve as a springboard in comprehending dreams. For instance, perhaps traumatic experiences constitute a core theme of a patient's dreams, suggesting an avenue for further treatment.
The self-organization theory of dreaming offers a framework distinct from psychoanalytic theories to explain how dreams are generated and operate. This theory proposes that dreams are a byproduct of the dreamer's physical and mental state during sleep, distinguishes between manifest and latent dream, and points out that the dream-work proposed by Freud is actually a result of information processing and self-organization in the sleeping brain. However, this theory allows the therapist to derive important information e.
Therefore, dream analysis may still prove useful in the therapeutic process. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. We would like to express our thanks to the reviewer for his valuable comments. Blagrove, M. Born, J. System consolidation of memory during sleep. Dream imagery as a result of emotions matching with images. Desseilles, M. Cognitive and emotional processes during dreaming: a neuroimaging view.
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Dreaming 3, — Dreaming and the self-organizing brain. Kavanagh, G. The patient's dreams of the analyst. Lane, R. Every gift, large or small, will help us build a bright future. The Interpretation of Dreams A guide to Sigmund Freud's theory of dreams and his method for dream interpretation. Unusually for a scientific monograph, The Interpretation of Dreams is a deeply personal book.
It closely follows how Freud builds his argument in The Interpretation of Dreams. Please support us An independent charity, we receive no public or government funding. Chapter 3 Wish Fulfilment Freud's basic claim is that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish. Chapter 4 Dream Distortion A censor is at work! Freud argues that dreams are disguised to get around censorship.
Chapter 5 The Dream-work Dreams follow their own kind of logic that Freud calls the 'dream-work'.
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