Essay/Term paper: Dreaming and sleeping

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Psychology

Dreams and dreaming are an important part of our lives and cultures of
epopel around the world. They are a reliable source of insight, personal
enrichment, and life affirming revelations. Dreams are the language of a
person's subconscious mind.
Before a person starts to dream, there are certain cylces or stages that
a person goes through in their sleep. Sleeping is important in our lives.
The ancient Geeks beleived that sleep was a grant. Manny people spend about
25 years in sleeping and dreaming.
There are four 90 minute stages of sleep that a person go through in
their sleep. Ot begins with stage 1. This is when breathing is regular,
heart rate slows down, and blood pressure decreases. A perosn could still be
awake during this stage. They are still concious. Slowly the person drifts
to stage 2. During this stage, the person is still realzed and they do not
know what is going on in the outside surroundings. As the perosn falls
deeper into sleep, the person falls into stage 3 and 4. It is harder to wake
soemone up when they reached this stage.
It takes about an hour for a perosn to go through all four stages. Yet,
not everyone goes through all of these stages a nioght. Throughout the
night, stages four and fivere repeated.
REM (rapid eye movement) takes place when a person is at the deepest
level of sleep. In REM, eyes move quicly under the eyelid. Dreaming takes
place at this stage. Dreams occur more often and they are more real at this
stage. These dreams are story like, intense, and passionate.
There are amny ways to look at dreams. The psychoanalytic, biological,
and cognitive views of dreaming are the three wyas theories to look at
dreams. THese theories has not been tested for researchers to find enough
information.
In psychoanalytic view, Freud came up with a theory called the
"wish-fulfilmetn theory." Wish-fulfilemtn throy is "Freud's theory of dream
interpretation that emphasizes the roles of maiffest and latent content of
dreams" (Huffman, Vernoy, and Vernoy, 139). In a psychoanalytic view, they
say that dreams are hidden signs of supresses needs. In a biological
perspective, they beleive that dreams are not importatn- they are stimultaion
of brain cells. In a cognitive view, they beleive dreams is an important
part of information proecssing.
There is no proven fact on why we dream. This is why there are a lot og
theories on dreaming. There is amnu dream theorists that wrote theories on
why epople dream. Fruend was always nchnated by dreams. He belived that all
dreams are meaningful. In Frued's theory, he wrote that dreams carry our
hidden desires. Jung, another perosn who wrtoe about therores on dreaming
wrtoe that dreams carry meaning and that these dreams can be interperted by
the dreamer.
There is many theories about dreams yet, Freud's theory stands out the
most. He beleived that a dream portrays an ongoping wish wioth the previous
days activites. People mioght also deram about wihses that they had as a
child. Freud also beleived that nothing ismade up in a dream. They are
biologically determined and obtained from perosn's needs and personal
ecperiences.
The most iunteresting ideas among his theroy is his theory of dream
occurence. Dream will occur when the unconscious wish is bound to the
preconscious instead of just being removed. If there is too much going
through a person's ,ind-denial, regression, or repression, a dream will take
place.
Jung disagreed wiht Freud's theory and developed his own theory that
contradicted Freud's. Jung beleived the most effective method for a dream
interpretaion wa sthe use of series correlation. Freud did not beleive that
the dreamer could interpret theor own dream. He beleived that only trained
psychologists could interpret dreams.
Jung also categorized the mind into three parts- the collective
unconsciou, the personal unconscious, and the conscious. The collective
unconscious does not depend on personal expereinces. The personal
unconscious hold forgoteen assocation, unnoticed expereinces, repressed and
discarded thoguths and half thoughts. The conscious develops through
sensing, thinking, and intution.
A dream can also be traslated yet it involves sevreal stages. The first
stage involes clear understanding of dream structuvre. In every dream, there
is a dreamer. The dreamer represents consciousness and the psyche. The
person represent their awareness and perspective of life.
The second stage involvoes understanding the influences producing dream
content. Dremas infleunces affecting the person's subliminally. These
inflerunces affecting the person's life and consciouness. A person's dream
is a product of subliminal infleince.
Understanding dream descritpion is the third stage of dream translation.
This stage is the most difficult to understand. Our social and cultural
diffreences affect dreams and how we perceive certain dream images when we
are awake. However, there are two rules of dream translation. The first
rule is that all dream images are representations. Words are not iused, the
subconscious mind has metaphoric images. The second rule is that all dream
images reflect seomthing mental. Dreams occur in mental domain. The objects
and epople in a person's dream are not physical images. They are mental
images.
The final stage invovles the order of the process and teh context of
dream imagery. When a person is trying to remeber their dream they are
remembering series of images. All the images from the entire dream is needed
to traslate the meaning of the dream. Studying the whole dream is more
important to understand then studying only one image of a dream.
Review dreams is condtions and challenges of life and how we view
ourselves. These dreams show how we evolve through our life expereices.
Many people beleive that theoriues on dreaming is pointless. Some beleive
that dreams are meaningless to us and jsut another thing that is part of our
lives. Yet, there are otehr who say dreams are either the clearing of
fragments from our memory that was stored. However, there are other people
who do not beleive it and argue aainst it. These epople say the dreams are
important to live a full and complete life. It is difficult for us to study
dream and how it works while we are sleeping. People can only decide for
themselves and belive what they wa to believe in. Only the dreamer can
determine what is right or wrong.