Zoitsa Ilieva I I. Titlе page: Title: Theories concerning the definition of dreams Autor: Zoitsa Ilieva Student number: Cohort: 2017/2018 Class code: FIE1A Module: Propaedeutic Module 5/ Effective communication skills Lecturer’s name: Simone Rademakers Institute: Fontys International Business School Study course: International Business Date of completion: 01.06.2018 Place: Venlo Spelling: British English I II. Table of contents Cover page .................................................................................................................................. I. Title page………………………………………………………………………………………….I II. Table of contents………………………………………………………………………………....II III. Summary ............................................................................................................................ III IV. Preface:............................................................................................................................... IV V. Glossary………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..V 1. Introduction: ....................................................................................................................... 6 2. Topic description: ................................................................................................................ 7 3. What are dreams?-Theories................................................................................................. 8 3.1. Wish fulfillment ........................................................................................................ 8 3.2. Extensions of Waking Life ........................................................................................ 9 3.3. Activation Synthessis theory ..................................................................................... 9 3.4. Continual-activation theory ...................................................................................... 9 3.5. Threat simulation ..................................................................................................... 9 3.6. Dreams tells us what to do ...................................................................................... 10 3.7. Dreams are data...................................................................................................... 10 3.8. Dreams are memories in action ............................................................................... 10 4. Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 11 5. Critical Appraisal........................................................................................................... 12 Reference list ......................................................................................................................... 13 II III. Summary The topic of this report is “Theories concerning the definition of dreams”. It focuses on some of the most popular theories such as Wish fulfillment, the Extensions of Waking Life, Activation Syntessis theory, Continual-activation theory, Threat simulation and others discussed in the next paragraph. The first theory is wish fulfillment which talks about achieving ones goals through dreams. The second theory is the extensions of waking life which discusses escaping from depressions through dreams. The third theory is activation synthesis theory which claims that the brain tries to respond to stimuli through dreams. The fourth theory is continual-activation theory that talks about saving memories from short-term memory to long-term memory when dreaming. The fifth theory is threat simulation which discusses that by dreams we can save ourselves from lifethreating situations. The sixth theory explains that dreams tell us what to do. The seventh theory claims that dreams are data. The eight theory discusses the dreams as memories in action. Each theory provides different definitions of dreams. They give possible answers to the question “What are dreams?”. Furthermore, the different explanations given show the different perspectives of people from different times. This allows us to see how the answers of this question have changed during the years. Therefore, with the new information discovered we can make our own conclusions based on the answers given by the theories. In some theories examples are given in order to show that dreams are connected to our conscious lives. Moreover, some of the examples can be considered to prove the theories that they belong to. Nevertheless, we must point out that many of these theories have not yet been scientifically proven and thus, there is no such thing as a right answer to the question “What are dreams?”. Therefore, the articles used provide only theories. The aim of this report is to give possible answers to the question previously mentioned. The goal has been achieved by providing the readers with this information from which conclusions can drawn. This paper does not give a definite answer rather it proves a range of possible answers for the readers to choose from. III IV. Preface: This present report is part of the Propaedeutic Module 5- Effective communications skills. The three components forming the final grade for the semester is formed by this report, communication plan and emails, which will be graded at the end of the second semester. It is mandatory requirement for all students of the program International Business and Management Studies in Fontys University of Applied Sciences Venlo. The report is an individual assignment such as the other two components. The purpose of this assignment is to teach us how to write a report, how to do research for a certain topic and to improve our writing skills. Therefore, the students are allowed to choose their own topic in order to make it interesting for them to write. During the semester the students were provided with presentations on how to write a report as well as feedback in order for them to fully understand the process of writing a report. The audience of this report are Mrs. Simone Rademakers and everyone who is interested in the topic. I would like to thank my teacher Mrs. Rademakers for her supporting attitude, for her help and for providing me with feedback every time. Venlo, 12.06.2018 Zoitsa Ilieva IV Glossary REM- Rapid eye movement The interpretation of dreams- “an 1899 book by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, in which the author introduces his theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation and discusses what would later become the theory of the Oedipus complex.” (En.wikipedia.org, 2018) Sleep and Dream Databases – “The SDDb contains thousands of dream reports from a wide variety of people, along with information about their sleep patterns and demographic factors like gender, age, and marital status” (Bulkeley, 2016). Vivid dreams- “It's any dream in which, while physically asleep, you also: know that you're dreaming and/or can control the dream or direct your awareness” (Turner, n.d.). Kaleidoscopic – “constantly changing set of colors” (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition, n.d.). V 1. Introduction: This report focuses on answering the question: “What are dreams?’’. There are many theories that give an answer to this question. Therefore, such theories will be discussed in chapter 3. Nowadays, people do not believe that dreams mean anything. Most people do not believe in dreams because they do not see how dreams can represent their lives. Moreover, it is hard to have trust in your own dreams if they do not have any physical representation. Most consider dreams to be nothing. They do not realize what their dreams mean. Unfortunately, this is wrong because dreams can say a lot about a person, their personality, fears and emotional stage. At the same time there are many people who are searching for dreams interpretations without looking deeper in the dream process. There is not a 100% right answer for the meaning of the dreams, there is an enormous amount of sources providing different explanation and different theories. Therefore, people are confused and loose motivation to put effort in searching for this information. This leads to misunderstanding of the dreaming process which is half of our lives. The aim of this report is to motivate people to keep researching the topic and to read more about it in order to try to clarify some of the theories that were found to be interesting. This information is useful for people who do not know what to believe since this report presents different theories that people can find useful and use all of them to understand what dreams are and how they can be explained. The aim of the report is to provide the readers with all the main information they are interested in such as theories about what dreams are, the meaning of the dreams and suggestions why do we actually dream. This topic was chosen because nowadays people are not educated on such topics. Dreams are part of us and they can explain many things from what we want to eat to how we think we are going to die. Most of the times our dreams are a representation of our beliefs. The data used in this paper is secondary data such as online articles. On this topic primary data cannot be acquired due to the fact that an experiment must be conducted for which subjects are needed. Unfortunately, this is not possible for this assignment due to the reason that we are first year students. 6 2. Topic description: The topic of this report is “Theories concerning the definition of dreams”. It includes possible theories which explain what dreams are. Dreams are a phenomenon that each person passes through each night. Scientists have been trying for decades to reach to only one explanation of dreams and why do we dream. Sadly, until present time they have not been able to reach to a conclusive definition. There are theories explaining that dreams are a window to our unconscious (Sigmund Freud) or that our brain tries to interpret random signals resulting in dreams (Allan Hobson) and many more, described in the content. Each action has explanation, which means that there are possible answers to the question “what the dreams are?” This topic was chosen because there are many people looking for answers related to dreaming process, that they cannot find for different reasons. Therefore, this paper is supposed to provide information that can help people reach answers for their questions. Nowadays, people are busy every day with different tasks concerning their everyday life duties. Therefore, there is a lack of time for acquiring knowledge in order to go deeper in this topic. There are many TV shows that have contents related to dreams which grab the attention of viewers. Such shows provide information and examples of possible definitions of what dreams are. Unfortunately, such shows confuse people even more especially because the aim of a show is to attract people even if they have to use false information. By answering to the topic question, important information will be provided which is collected from several sources. Even more the aim is to produce a quality report which can be used by everyone who wants to understand what is happening during half of their lifetime, during the night while they are dreaming. The aim is to provide information from which answers can be drawn in order to help people and prevent misunderstandings. In the web space there are thousands of articles related to dreams. The paper will discuss deeply as many articles as possible which are carefully chosen. Then a summary of all the theories used will be provided. In this report eight theories will be discussed such as wish fulfillment, extensions of waking life, activation synthesis theory, continual-activation theory, threat simulation and so on. Each theory will be explained in order for people to find answers to their questions according to the theory they believe in. 7 3. What are dreams? -Theories There are many theories that present possible explanations. Nevertheless, many of these still remain unproved. However, with the improvement of the technology specialists are trying to prove some of those theories. Dreams are short scenes, pictures, sounds, subjects and voices, basically everything that appears in our sleep mode. Some parts of the dreams can be known and unknown people, sometimes people that have not yet been met but after certain period of time such an event may occur, dead people, known and unknown places, etc. They can illustrate your dreams, and yet at the same time your biggest fears. Each person has different dreams that can be related to everything in their life. They can affect our emotions and feelings. The dreams are a state of unconsciousness - experiences that we have while we are asleep (Bryant, n.d.). In Dr. Siclari’s opinion: “The experience is real, imaginary, but real.” (Christian, 2017). Of course it is not really happening, but the feelings that occur are real. Dreams appear at any time of the sleeping process. Among everything related to dreams in general, there is one thing we are sure about: dreams are most abundant and best remembered during the REM1 stage of sleep. This is the deepest stage of the sleeping cycle and 92% of the time in the posterior cortical region- the back of the brain. During this stage our heart rate and breathing become irreconcilable, skeletal mussels occur, the eyes are moving speedily and then the brain is most active. Everybody dreams around 6-8 hours per night (4 to 6 times), although there are people claiming they do not. In that case they do not remember anything from the dream. Most people remember their dreams just for a short period of time and after that their memories are disappear (Christian, 2017). 3.1.Wish fulfillment This is one of the most popular theories from the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, which explains that dreams are wish-fulfillments. He was the first person to understand how important dreams are in therapy processes. According to Freud (Smith, 2001-2003): “A dream is the conscious expression of an unconscious fantasy or wish which is not accessible to the individual in waking life”. In his opinion each dream represents a way to get what we desire. Furthermore, he tought that dreams are messages from the subcountious which help us for a better understanding of ourselves. Freud suggests that through dreams people make conections to their uncounscious mind .Moreover, that dreams are desires which people keep while they are awake and express while sleeping (Christian, 2017). In his opinion there is a posible existance of “censor” which makes people reject uncountious whishes throughout contious states (Smith, 2001-2003). The Sigmund Freud theory is the only one of the popular theories that claims that dreams serve to regale uncounscious wishes and longings. However, the more modern points of view suggest that the surfacing of the conscious are preoccupations of life (Smith, 2001-2003). 1 see glossary for explanation 8 3.2. Extensions of Waking Life This theory suggests that dreams can prevent depression. A research, made in RushPresbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, proves that people who are under depression can easily recover if they dream about it, which explains why some people can recover from depression and other can not. There is a study, developed by Rosalind Cartwright, Ph.D., and his colleagues to test if people experiencing marial brake up would recover more rapidly, “if they are able to construct and recall well-developed, emotionally rich dreams.” (Smith, 2001-2003). In Cartwringht’s opinion the problems solving takes place during sleeping. 3.3.Activation Synthessis theory In this theory the explanation of dreams is that during REM sleep our brain activates itself and synthesizes the generated information into dreams. In the opinion of Robert McCarley and J. Allan Hobson dreams are the brains attempt to respond to the received stimuli during the day. When a person is awake he is not able to respond in a rational way so the result of a dream (Smith, 2001-2003). 3.4.Continual-activation theory This is a theory of the psychiatrist Jie Zhang which explains that our brain constantly creates memories while we are awake, as well as, while we are asleep. However, our dreams are something like a depository where our memories are held for a short-time period before they move on to the long-term memory. Another theory that comes quite close to the Zhang’s theory is that we dream because we have to remember something. It is based on researches which suppose that “people remember what they've learned better if they dream after learning it” (Newitz & Bennington-Castro, 2013). 3.5. Threat simulation This theory was developed in Finland by the philosopher Antti Revonusuo and explains that dreams serve to help people deal with life-threatening situations. Those who dream about these situations are most likely to be able to deal with the situations easier in real life because they have already experienced them while sleeping. The Psychologist Mark Blechner has a theory which has something in common with the theory of Revonusuo. In his opinion: “[To] create new ideas, through partial random generation, which can then be retained if judged useful… Dreams introduce random variations into psychic life and internal narratives. They produce ‘thought mutations.’ Our minds can then select among these mutations and variations to produce new kinds of thought, imagination, self-awareness, and other psychic functions.” (Newitz & Bennington-Castro, 2013). There is one more theory similar to these two which is of a Harvard researcher Deirde Barrett. His theory presents dreams as a problem-solving- the ability of people to deal with their problems more effectively while sleeping than while they are awake. The reason for this is that the dreaming mind makes connections faster than the waking mind. (Newitz & BenningtonCastro, 2013) 9 3.6.Dreams tells us what to do One very interesting theory is that dreams tell us what to do. There are popular examples proving this theory such as the dream of René Descartes in 17th century in which he dreamt about a sea and big waves crashing into the beach. Suddenly, everything stopped moving as it was frozen. Descartes had the opportunity to walk on those waves and to see some frozen fishes. When he woke up he drew something like grid of lines. This has been the system of coordinates which nowadays is famous as the Cartesian coordinate system. An example is the dream of Sigmund Freud which was the reason he wrote the “The interpretation of dreams2’’. In the night before his father’s funeral in his dream (1896) he saw a message on a door: “You are requested to close the eye(s)” (Baer, 2016). Another example is about Abraham Lincoln. “He reported having vivid dreams3 the night before any ‘great and important event of the war’, as a colleague of Lincoln’s noted in his diary; he telegraphed his wife to put their sons’ pistols away after an ‘ugly’ dream; and he reportedly dreamt of a White House funeral just a few days before his assassination’’ (Baer, 2016). 3.7.Dreams are data Scientists started exploring dreams in the 50’s with the discovery of REM by the researchers from the University of Chicago- Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitmane. Nowadays with scanning of the brain, scientists can even understand the content of dreams and to record them. The dream researcher Bulkeley has collected in his “Sleep and Dream Databases”4 20 000 dreams of volunteers all over the world. By examination of those, he claims that the people rarely stayed alone in their dreams. Most of the times there are other people which are somehow close to the person. Bulkeley said: “Dreams reflect the emotional concerns we have in our relationships”; “Dreaming is really a resource for exploring the qualities of our relationships, who we care about, where we struggle.” (Baer, 2016). 3.8.Dreams are memories in action For more then a century, experts are trying to figure out how dreams improve our memoryespecially the long-term memory. Neuroscientists are now finding that the kaleidoscopic5 imagery is related to the memory-making process and it is even its by-product. “When your different threads of experience are bound together, the result is as familiar as it is alien.” (Baer, 2016). The researcher Sue Lewellyn has the same point of view and in addition he said: “It is not ‘real’ because it hyper-associates several memories. During REM sleep, on the phenomenological level, this composite image is experienced as a dream scene.” (Baer, 2016). There are a lot of experiments which prove this theory. One of them is made with birds- in the beginning of their lives they cannot sing, so they must learn to do so. The experiment shows that while dreaming there are neurons activated in their brain and while singing there are the same neurons that flare during their sleep. Therefore, birds dream about singing, maybe they have heard the song of their parents and it is convert in a memory (Furman, 2017). 2 see glossary for further explanation see glossary for further explanation 4 see glossary for further explanation 5 see glossary for further explanation 3 10 4. Conclusion The dreams are something still unproven nowadays. There are a lot of theories giving possible explanations about what are the dreams and what they do for us. The exploration has started centuries ago and some of the new theories are based on the old ones. With time passing is absolutely normal that the technology is developing even more and more. The explorations are with better outcome than before. |Scientists have been trying to acquire proof for most of the assumptions, at least for the new ones. It can be concluded that all the theories have something in common. For example, for all of them dreams have a meaning and a purpose. Some dreams give directions and signs in life. For example, dreams help in finding a solution for a problem or just help to realize something which cannot be accepted by a person while he/she is awake. Others fulfill wishes. The real explanation of dreams can be considered to be a combination of all theories. Moreover, a lot of similarities can be seen through all the assumptions. If we think about the dreams that we have they have relations to our real lives. Furthermore, the situations in our real life reflect on our dreams. Here is the moment where it should be mentioned that in a certain night we do not dream about the day before it. Normally we dream about past moments, which actually are our memories. Of course, when something during the day deeply affects our feelings is most likely to have an effect on our dream, as the Activation Synthesis theory claims. During the day our consciousness works, and we do not pay attention to each important thing. While dreaming our unconscious turns on and then our brain responds to the received message from the day. Like this we understand more about ourselves and our lives. Another theory which has something in common with the previous one assumes that dreams are memories in action. Simply explained, it claims that sometimes we feel that our dreams are real because they are mix of our memories. An addition to this theory is that we learn while we are sleeping. Furthermore, there is a popular thought that if you want to learn something better play a record of this thing while sleeping- so this should be true, maybe not for everyone but if a lot of people experience it, this way of memorizing works. This thought can be found in the theory that dreams are data and in the Continual-activation theory. To conclude, the theories described in this report are still just assumptions that are not proven so no one has to believe in them. When someone is informed about them he/she can decide which theory is relevant for themselves. Maybe the right answer is combination of all theories which has been proven by the previous two paragraphs. At the end of the day even if we choose to believe in only one theory we can see elements of other theories in our daily life. Therefore, the question is what do we choose to believe? 11 5. Critical Appraisal There are several issues that were faced in this report. The first issue was choosing the right topic. The second problem was distinguishing which information was relevant for the topic chosen. The third issue was discovering which information was reliable. The issues will be explained in the following paragraphs. The first issue was choosing the right topic. The initial idea was to choose the topic “What dreams are and what kinds of dreams exists”. Unfortunately, there was no conclusive information about that topic which made it harder to describe the different kinds of dreams. Therefore, the topic was changed to “Theories concerning the definition of dreams”. This was chosen due to the fact that most of the information that was found discussed the issue concerning the confusion of people when it comes to the definition of dreams. Therefore, in order to be able to conclude what the definition is this topic was chosen to provide different perspectives. The second issue was distinguishing which information was relevant for the topic. There are many articles that talk about dreams and what they mean. Unfortunately, none of them are conclusive and most of them tend to go in another direction in order to escape from the question what the definition of dreams is. Therefore, many articles were not relevant to the topic and were not useful. Moreover, they provided information about dreams that was not on the topic itself instead it they were about connections between dreams and for example faith. Furthermore, it was hard to distinguish which information was on the topic that has been discussed in this paper. The third issue was discovering which information was reliable. There are many articles that talk about the same topics in different ways. Unfortunately, many of them were from blogs, posts and other forms of opinions expressed by the public. Therefore, they were not reliable due to the fact that they were not supported by any evidence. The articles that were found and used were all accredited to be reliable. Unfortunately, finding such articles took a lot of time and effort. In order to be able to give an answer to this topic an experiment needs to be conducted. In combination with the information provided in this paper an experiment can give final results from which conclusions can be drawn. In such an experiment the information used needs to be accurate, reliable and relevant. Moreover, the time provided was not enough to conduct an experiment which lead us to the current results of the paper. Future improvements would be to find even more reliable and relevant articles. 12 Reference list American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. kaleidoscopic. Retrieved from https://www.thefreedictionary.com/kaleidoscopic Baer, D. (2016). 5 of Humanity’s Best Ideas of What Dreams Actually Are. Retrieved from https://www.thecut.com/2016/10/what-are-dreams.html Bryant, C. What are dreams?. Retrieved from https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/whatare-dreams.htm Bulkeley, K. (2016). Examples of SDDb data you can explore. Retrieved from http://sleepanddreamdatabase.org Christian, B. (2017). The science of dreams: what are they and why do we do it?. Retrieved from http://www.wired.co.uk/article/why-do-we-dream-what-are-dreams Furman, T. (2017). The Most Powerful Theories Of Dreams: Are They Messages Or Signs?. Retrieved from https://onedio.co/content/the-most-powerful-theories-of-dreams-are-theymessage-or-signs-14165 Newitz, A., & Bennington-Castro, j. (2013). Retrieved from https://io9.gizmodo.com/10theories-that-explain-why-we-dream-897195110 Smith, S. (2001). Interpretation of dreams, Sigmund Freud. Retrieved from http://www.smithwebdesign.com/worldofdreams/theory.html The Interpretation of Dreams. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interpretation_of_Dreams Turner, R. The Six Types of Dreams. Retrieved from http://www.world-of-luciddreaming.com/types-of-dreams.html 13
