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Do you ever wake up one night from a dream so vivid, it felt as if you were awake living the ideas in your sleep? I have spent lots of my life fascinated why we dream, what we do and their mysterious purpose within our everyday life . Dreams have been researched through many philosophers and scientists over thousands of years. This curiosity or uncertainty is the reason why I decided to do my paper on this topic. In this essay I will be going into depth with Sigmund Freud’s ideas of dreaming and discover the answers behind what is really going on while we are asleep.I will also be discussing the history of dreams, the science behind them, theory of nightmares as well as today’s explanation of why we dream what we do.
Dreams can be explained as different emotions, ideas and sensations that occur involuntarily in a human brain while they are sleeping.
Dreams can range from vague to incredibly vivid, filled with happiness, stress, fear or confusing.
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Alcohol, drugs, stress or even the food we eat has been said to alter our dreams more vivid or unusual. I was always told as a kid that eating cheese before bed could make your dreams more abnormal. Although dreaming can feel like it can take up the entirety of your rest, dreams actually only occur during the rapid eye movement stage of sleep, lasting around 2 hours in total. It is very uncommon, but dreams can occur within other stages of sleep, but will be much less vivid and difficult to remember.
On average, one person usually has 2-5 dreams per night that can last only 5 seconds, to over 20 minutes. Some people find it very common to dream about friends, family, school or even work. But sometimes, dreams can be a mix of your imagination filled with creatures out of world settings and images that are unexplainable. It is said that everyone in the world has dreams, but a small part of the population has reported to never remembering or experiencing dreams.
Although dreaming has been an active part of everyone’s sleep cycle and many theories have been testing by psychologists, there is still no answer as to what dreams serve as a purpose. Some theorists suggest that dreams are meaningless and serve no purpose, but others insist that dreams are an essential part of your emotional and mental thoughts going through your life. Sigmund Freud suggested that dreams can represent unconscious desires, thoughts and motivations. While Freud also studied the psychoanalytic view of personality, he was able to relate aggressive and sexual instincts in dreams to conscious awareness within our everyday lives. Freud focuses on two different components of dreams: manifests ideas ( made up of actual thoughts, and imagine) as well as latent content( hidden meanings behind a dream). Freud also spent lots of his time focusing on the process of dreams he liked to call “dream work”. Condensation revealed that many different concepts are represented with a span of a single dream. For example, if you are stressed in school, you can experience tons of small dreams where you feel overwhelmed that can relate to your thoughts just before you fall asleep. Many people who are drowning in their place of employment find it difficult to “turn off” and find themselves continuously dreaming vivid situations of being at their place of work, and being behind or under stress. This can result in the feeling of exhaustion and even insomnia because while your mind and body should be resting when you finish your shift, your brain is still racing of the idea of your job. Symbolization is the operation that censors ideas that your mind is thinking about in real life to objects within your dream. Symbolization takes thoughts that we have throughout our day and manifest into our dreams with images in a bizarre way.
Dreams have been a curiosity to generations long before we were alive. In ancient Egypt, people with vivid dreams were known to be sacred, and lots of their dreams have even been recorded on papyrus. Some people even believed that sleeping on sanctified “dream beds” could bring you wisdom from the gods. Regardless of whether dreams can predict the future, tell us about our past, or simply help us understand ourselves, the process of studying dreams has always been either symbolic of philosophical. None of these can really be scientifically tested so theories will be analyzed forever. But what is this is all a waste of time? What if dreams do not mean anything at all? Many neuroscientists have come to the conclusion that dreams are just a side effect consisting of neurological processes while we are asleep. Even though many people believe that the brain is shutting down and resting during the sleeping period, the brain is actually working the hardest during REM period. One of the main reasons why the body needs to sleep is to allow the brain to organize and centralize our memories. Much like our Iphones, our brains must “charge up” and optimize their hard disk and consolidate the memories we have stored. During this process the brain is able to get rid of the things that aren’t needed (unnecessary experiences from past days giving the more important memories more room to store). Research has shown that people recall information and tasks much better after sleeping, and that their memory can suffer if sleep is irregular or interrupted. This is why our parents are constantly pushing us to go to bed early the night before a big test or a sports game.
Almost everyone has experienced a nightmare once in their life. A nightmare can consist of terrifying imagines or “stories” that can awaken people in an awful frighten. Nightmares usually occur during the last hours of REM sleep. Although children are more common to endure night terrors, at least half of grownups have occacial nightmares, and around 10% report to frequent or recurring episodes. Nightmares are common unpleasant memories of a scary movie or fear that humans think about during their wakefull life, which can be caused by fear or anxiety. Nightmares can be associated with stress, lack of sleep, improper diet or even illness. It is very common in people who have experienced a traumatic life event to continuously dream about that specific life event, which can almost haunt us as life progresses. People who are experiencing that same nightmare quite frequently can be suffering from Nightmare disorder. There are many ways of coping through these scary dreams by talking to someone or even seeing psychological help. Many researchers have proposed that negative dreams can be a sign of “threat rehearsals” where we rehearse in our dreams possible threats that we encounter in real life.
While dreaming cannot predict the future, help us speak to aliens or give us unconscious powers to the real world, they do tell us a lot about our emotions. With today’s constantly hectic society, humans tend to get out of how they are feeling internally, and dreams can be a great insight for this. For example, if you are experiencing recurrent negative dreams, it might be a good time to take a second and check in with yourself about how you’ve been feeling. Dreams can be a way for you to take action within your life and help you to better your overall mood and self. At the end of the day, dreams can be a magical place for you to look into a different life and let your imagination run wild, so don’t take them too seriously, because eventually you will find yourself awake in your bed, ready to start your day.
Bibliography
Summary: The Psychology Of Dreaming By Sigmund Freud. (2024, Feb 28). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/summary-the-psychology-of-dreaming-by-sigmund-freud-essay
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