World of
Dreams
You Do Dream!
80-100% of
subjects awoken
during REM
reported vivid
dreams.
Dream Theories
1. Freud’s Theory of Dream Interpretation
2. Extensions of Waking Life
3. Activation-Synthesis Theory
4. Carl Jung
Early Dream Theories
• Prior to 1900
Dreams were
considered
meaningless
images.
Freud
• 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams
• Dreams: way to achieve wish fulfillment
• Free Association
Freud’s Theory
• Censor protects us from
realizing unconscious
desires (sex or aggression)
• Censor transforms thoughts into
harmless dream symbols
– Will not disturb sleep or
conscious thoughts
• Dreams are meaningful
• Dreams can be interpreted
Freud Says…
• Two types of dream content:
– Manifest: What you remember about a dream.
– Latent: what the dream was actually about.
• Displacement: emotional feelings displaced
from one object to another.
• Symbols: Latent content is converted in to
symbols
– Male = long objects (sticks, bats, pencil, umbrellas)
– Female = Hollow things (cave, jar, bucket)
Male or Female
What Do They Mean?
• Psychoanalyst would decode symbols to
release a patient’s unconscious desires.
Jung’s Theory
• Neo-Freudian
– Personal Dreams
– Collective Dreams
• Collective Unconscious –
shared human experience
• Relies on “traditional”
human conflicts:
– Archetypes – emotionally
charged images with
universal meaning
– Anima v. animus – female
v. male struggle.
– Foundation of multiple
personalities.
Extensions of Waking Life
Rosalind Cartwright (Cognitive Problem Solving):
Dreams reflect waking thoughts, fears,
emotions, and problems.
Like Chapters in a book..
Sleep lab dreams flow like
chapters in a book focused
on current concerns and
feelings.
Activation-Synthesis
Theory
Random/meaningless activity of nerve cells
– Biological
– Nerve impulses are sent to brain cortex
which then tries to make sense of them
RESULT: random feelings, images, scenes…
Brain Scans
• During REM:
– Pre-frontal cortex (off) {planning and
reasoning}
– Limbic system (on) {emotions}
– Visual Cortex (on) {visual experience}
RESULT: dreams are emotional and
visual but bizarre and disorganized.