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Over a seventy-year life span, you will spend at least fifty thousand hours to dreaming (Segell 42). What you dream about can be very different from one individual to another and from one dream to another in the same individual. Many things affect what we dream about and the theories about why we dream vary. Scientists believe that dreaming is a natural process of the brain. On the other hand, Psychologists believe that our dreams are secretive emotions.
Both sides have been spending years researching dreams and yet we are still baffled. Before we can even consider where dreams come form or what causes them you must first understand the steps and stages to sleep. In order for a person to dream they must be in a period of rest which they lose awareness of their surroundings, that which is 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 (rapid eye movement) sleep with stages three and four also being referred to as delta sleep, due to 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 (Lowe 83). 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 is where sleepwalking and night terror occur in children.
Neither of these occurrences is 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, which then causes REM (Lowe 94).
The brain will also produce fast frequency, low amplitude beta that is normally produced when a person is awake. Since the waves produced during sleep are identical to those while you are fully awake, you heart rate, oxygen consumption, breathing and eye movement are also identical. The only thing affected is the muscle tension in the neck and limbs. Throughout and 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 (Lowe 118).
Now that you understand what takes place during sleep we can look into what affects dreams. Gender affects many things, including the way we dream. Men typically dream about fighting, protecting, or compelling in an outside environment; women are more likely to dream about relationships and loss in an outside environment (Segell 42). Men are usually brought up with the notion that they should be aggressive. Because of this they will either dream about how aggressive they are or their lack of aggression. Women, however, are brought up thinking that they should and / or more emotional then men.
Therefore, women are more likely to dig into their interior life whether awake or asleep (Segell 42). What this means is that women typically read more into a situation than men do. Although the are many differences between a man and woman's dream there are similarities. Researchers have found that problems occurring during your day will be worked out through the sleep process (Segell 42).
Both sexes also dream about sex and the ongoing infatuation about the body and physical appearances. This idea that men and women dream alike is an important fact; it shows that in both sexes the mind works very similarly. This is important because it helps research; before we can completely understand dreams we must first understand how the mind works. Dreams perform emotional homework that helps us master life's lessons (Graves 190).
The mind will work sub-consciously on the small things in life that are often missed because of the larger problems. Many times your mind will put information together that was gathered over either a long or short period of time. For instance, of two pieces of information were obtained, the mind would sub-consciously put them together while in a dream state. While both men and women have the ability to do this, women have and easier time remembering dreams (Graves 190). This could be either because of the content of the dreams or because men do not worry as much about them as women are known to do. The mind also in a dream state can process certain outside stimuli.
We close our most important sensory channels, our eyes, and try to protect the other senses from all stimuli or from any modification of the stimuli acting on them (Freud 56). When we are asleep the body tries to close out all of the stimuli that would affect or influence our dreams. The body can do this pretty well but when a strong enough stimulus is encountered when we are asleep, we tend to wake up. An example of this would be when we are sleeping and there is a storm.
We don't hear the rain pounding against the window but we will wake up as soon as the thunder strikes. This, however, doesn't always work. I'm sure we can all remember a time when we are dreaming, and in the distance we hear someone screaming out name, only to wake up later on and realize it was out mother. This happens because the mind registers these stimuli and turns them into dream imagery. The sensory stimuli that reached us during our sleep may very well become one of the sources of dreams (Freud 57). Stimuli that could affect a dream include the amount of stress we are under, if we are feeling ill, menstruation, and the position we are in, including the direction we are facing!
Almost every noise, contact or feeling influences a dream image. Scientists have done studies on the reaction of stimuli on someone in a dream state. Through the research they found that the stimuli must be of a certain amount of force and depending what dream state the subject is in (Freud 59). According to recent research, mot 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. Expert 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).
Research has discovered many interesting facts about dreams. Research has found that age is also another component of dreaming. Small children are scared easily so they dream mainly of animals and monsters that chase and attack them. Teenagers dream of romances and sex.
Adults between the ages of 21 and 34 more often than not have dreams of moral issues. They are at the 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 ages 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 Keisler 143). Another interesting fact researchers have found is that most people dream in color and the dreams usually involve motion and action. Dreams are visual in nature and often do not use taste, smell or touch.
The length of dreams will always vary, but most last as long as a daydream would last. Dreams do not only occur in REM, but it is possible to dream during a short nap (Llinas and Pare 32). A significant controversy that arises is the question of where dreams have intentional or personal meaning. This debate is between scientists and psychologists, especially psychoanalysts. Scientists do not believe in the interpretation of dreams because they feel dreams are a biological process of the brain to keep it active. They think that numerous sections of the brain aid in dreaming, and 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 tegmen tum, begin to aid in the dreaming process when the brain goes into REM sleep (Llinas and Pare 28). Some neurological research indicates that large brain cells in the primitive brain stem spontaneously fire about every 90 minutes, sending random stimuli to the cortical areas of the brain. As a consequence, memory, sensory, muscle-control, and cognitive areas of the brain are randomly stimulated, resulting I the higher cortical brain attempting to make sense of it. This is what gives rise to a dream in a scientist's perspective. The psychoanalysts' perspective all began with Sigmund Freud. 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 of random events. He stated that all dreams have a cause, which come from a certain life event. The content of most dreams is made up of sex, aggression, wish fulfillment and childhood memories. According to Freud, dreams are the road to the unconscious mind.
He felt dreaming was a time away from the waking self in which your innermost thoughts and feelings could be liberated. Psychologists also use dreams as psychotherapy to cure the mentally disturbed. They agree with Freud that dreams are an emotional outlet, and believe they can be very beneficial to health. Psychoanalysts also believe that dreams are considered the indication of some hidden truths, certain notions, misconceptions, imagination, stress, or sickness.
That is why it is important to them to not over look a dream. I agree with the psychoanalysts' ideas. I like to think that my dreams do mean something, and could possibly help me in the future. There is so much still unknown about dreams that who knows if we will ever be able to completely understand them. Humans, as far as we know, are the most complex creatures out there. We are so extraordinary in that we are aware of what is going on and who we are.
We can make things and figure out all sorts of problems that are just amazing. And although we are aware of who we are, we can't understand how we have come to be. The key to everything lies in our minds, and who knows maybe in our dreams. Graves, Ginny.
What your dreams are trying to tell you. Glamour Aug. 1998 v 96, n 8, p 190 - 191, 236 Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: AVON BOOKS, 1965 Lowe, Ralph.
Interpreting Dreams. New York: Doubleday, 1963. Segell, Michael. Dreams: His and Hers.
Esquire Feb. 1996 v 125, n 2 p 42 Llinas, R. & Pare, D. Of Dreaming and Wakefulness. Neuroscience. New York: Harper 1991. Von Keisler, K. Cognition in Dreaming.
Los Angeles: J. P. Teacher 1985 Bibliography:
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