December 9th, 2014
CS 110-1
Valeria Muzzin
Dreaming and the Brain
How do dreams occur?
Freud’s view of dreams
Dream Contents
Primitive Instinct Rehearsal Theory
Dreaming and the Brain
When we sleep, we go through five sleep stages.
The first stage is a very light sleep from which it is
easy to wake up. The second stage moves into a
slightly deeper sleep, and stages three and four
represent our deepest sleep. Our brain activity
throughout these stages is gradually slowing down
so that by deep sleep, we experience nothing but
delta brain waves -- the slowest brain waves. About
90 minutes after we go to sleep and after the fourth
sleep stage, we begin REM sleep….
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How do dreams occur?
Despite years of research, the neurological
basis for dreams is still not entirely certain,
and several theories (including the activation
synthesis theory, the long-term memory
excitation theory, the continual-activation
theory, and others) have been proposed for
how and why dreams occur at all, none of
which are entirely satisfactory or universally
accepted.
The activation-synthesis model, proposed by
J. Allan Hobson and Robert McClarley back in
the 1970s, suggests that, as circuits in the
brain become activated during REM sleep…
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Freud’s view of dreams
In
the
late
19th
century,
psychotherapist Sigmund Freud developed a
theory that the content of dreams is driven by
unconscious wish fulfillment.
Freud called dreams the "royal road to the
unconscious." He theorized that the content of
dreams reflects the dreamer's unconscious mind
and specifically that dream content is shaped by
unconscious wish fulfillment….
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Dream Contents
From the 1940s to 1985, Calvin S. Hall collected
more than 50,000 dream reports at Western
Reserve University. In 1966 Hall and Van De Castle
published The Content Analysis of Dreams, in which
they outlined a coding system to study 1,000 dream
reports from college students.Results indicated that
participants from varying parts of the world
demonstrated similarity in their dream content.
Hall's complete dream reports became publicly
available in the mid-1990s by Hall's protégé William
Domhoff, allowing further different analysis.
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Primitive Instinct Rehearsal Theory
Two researchers have postulated that dreams have
a biological function, where the content requires no
analysis or interpretation, that content providing an
automatic stimulation of the body's physiological
functions underpinning the human instinctive
behavior. So dreams are part of the human, and
animal, survival and development strategy. Professor Antti Revonsuo (2000) has limited his
ideas to those of "threat rehearsal," where dreams
exercise our primary self-defense instincts, and he
has argued this cogently in a number of
publications.
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