Sweet Dreams: Understanding your private dream world

Top five most common dreams for teenagers (boys/girls): 1. Being attacked or chased-78%/83% 2. Sexual experiences-85%/73% 3. Falling-73%/74% 4. School, teachers-57%/71% 5. Arriving too late-55%/62% The 12 “universal dreams:” gazette.com/pg/03341/ stmhttp:// gazette.com/pg/03341/ stm

How much time do we spend in our own private dream world? Dreams are “hallucinations of the sleeping mind.”

Non-REM sleep and dreams We also dream during non-REM stages

The content of dreams Primarily visual; 25% include auditory sensations, 20% involve bodily sensations For young men, 1 in 10 dreams are sexual, for young women, 1 in 30! Less than 1% of dreams involve tastes or smells People usually dream in color, but it’s often drab and murky, not vivid and colorful The dreamer plays an active role in 75% of his/her dreams; absent in only 10% Half of characters are people we know; the other half usually are not! 67% of characters in men’s dreams are men

The emotions of dreams Many dreams have a negative tone or a mixture of positive and negative Explanation:

Day residue The content of dreams is often similar to events in your waking life.

Stimulus incorporation Stimuli that occur during sleep can be incorporated into dreams either directly or in altered form.

Can we learn while we sleep? No. We forget everything five minutes before we fall asleep, and do not remember anything played when we are in deep sleep.

So… What is the function of dreams? What are dreams for?

#1: To satisfy our own wishes?  Sigmund Freud--The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)  Dreams are “the royal road to the unconscious,” a “psychic safety valve” for the id’s energy

Freud’s two levels  Manifest Content  Remembered story line of the dream  Latent Content  Underlying hidden meaning, buried in symbols (dream censorship)

Freud’s brightest student: Carl Jung Dreams are the key to our collective unconscious: our shared human memory

#2: To file away memories and to develop and preserve neural pathways? Dreams help sift, sort, and fix the day’s experiences in our memories, getting rid of useless connections, clearing space for new information

#3: To make sense of neural static? Hobson and McCarley: Activation synthesis theory The pons dispenses random bursts of electricity during REM, and dreams are your cortex’s attempt to make sense of it. The emotional limbic system also turns on, making dreams highly emotional The frontal lobes shut down; dreams are therefore less inhibited and logical than we normally are

#4: To solve problems? Rosalind Cartwright Dreams are the brain’s way of working things out; they exist to help us They help us get over life-changing events, maintain our sense of identity, keep our emotions in check, because we’re too busy during the way to figure it all out.

What do you think? That’s what we will find out over the next two days of our “Dream Team” activity!