Module 24 Notes
Sleep Deprivation and Dreams
New treatment that alleviates muscle fatigue, helps improve focus and concentration, is
known to improve you mood, increases your metabolism thus facilitating weight loss,
strengthens your immune system, and provides increased energy…. Better yet, supplies are
limitless, and FREE
SLEEP!!!
Sleep Deprivation
 Adults need between 7.5 and 9 hours of sleep per night to be highly effective
o Most do not get this much
 America and much of the Industrialized world does not sleep enough, thus operating off
of a sleep debt
Effects:
 Trouble focusing, irritability,
 weaker immune system,
o Suppress immune cells (3x more likely to get sick if 7 hours or less than 8+hour
 physically weaker and slower
 Weight Gain: Lack of sleep increases ghrelin (hunger arousing hormone) and decreases
leptin (hunger suppressing hormone)
Sleep Disorders:
Insomnia – recurring problems falling or staying asleep
Narcolepsy – Uncontrollable sleep attacks (lapsing directly into REM sleep) out of nowhere
 Usually lasts less than 5 minutes
Sleep Apnea – Sleep disorder involving the cessation of breathing and abrupt awakenings
Night Terrors – High arousal, appearance of being terrified, Occur during NREM 3 Sleep within
2-3 hours of falling asleep, rarely remembered.
Dreams:
Dream - a sequence of images, emotions, and thoughts passing through a sleeping person’s mind.
Dreams are notable for their hallucinatory imagery, discontinuities, and incongruities, and for
the dreamer’s delusional acceptance of the content and later difficulties remembering it.
Daydreams – involve familiar details of life, practical, logical etc..
Dreams – “hallucinations of the sleeping mind” are vivid, emotional, bizarre, incongruous,
disturbing
Dream Content:
Common Themes: Repeatedly failing, being attacked or pursued, being rejecting, experiences
misfortune, sexual content (only 1-10 for men and 1-30 for women)



More often dreams incorporate traces of previous days experiences and preoccupations
Our mind incorporates sensory stimuli from “real world” into our dreams ( a smell, spray
bottle, sound, etc…)
Memory of our dreams and what occurs in them is fleeting. To remember a dream get up,
stay up, and record it while it is fresh in your mind
Why? Meaning of Dreams:
1. Wish-Fulfillment – Sigmund Freud – Dreams provide a safe place for us to process and
discharge otherwise unacceptable feelings.
o Manifest Content = the remembered story / events of a dream
o Latent Content = the underlying meaning of the dream (forbidden, hidden)
*** This theory has been largely discarded as unprovable from a scientific perspective
2. Information Processing – Dreams help us sort, organize, rehearse, discard, and fix our
experiences from the day into memory.
o A good night’s sleep after a long day of studying improves our ability to remember
information
o Sleep Bulimia = Binge sleeping, often done by teens and young adults, may help
rejuvenate physical energy but hinders learning and memory
3. Neural Activity – “Neural Static”, random neural activity occurs throughout the night
and our brain attempts to make sense of it (telling a story on the fly). PET scans show
increased activity in the Limbic system (amygdala) but no activated in frontal lobe
regions (logical thinking). Thus explaining the illogical, uninhibited nature of dreams.
4. Cognitive Development –
*** We spend less time dreaming as we age