Bizarre Elements of Dreams In this Experiment, eighty-eight subjects were asked to individually recall and transcribe dreams and daydreams over a one-week period. It was also requested that they note anything prominent that had happened to them over that week. Results worksheets were the filled out and data was handed in for analysis. The hypothesis was to test Hobson & McCartley's activation-synthesis hypothesis that dreams would have more bizarreness than other waking narratives, Our results, however, failed to support this, instead showing a higher significance of bizarreness when daydreaming, and supporting the findings of Reinsel, Antrobus & Wollman. Scene shifts and transformations were also a focus of our study, results were in accordance with our hypothesis, however did not achieve statistical significance. A dream may be defined as a mental experience, occurring in sleep, which is characterised by hallucinoid imagery, predominantly visual and often vivid (Hobson & McCarley, 1977). J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley argue that dreams are simply the by-product of bursts of activity amaniting from subcortial areas in the brain (Hobson, 1988; Hobson & McCarley, 1977; McCarley, 1994, cited in W. Weiten, 1998). One explanation of bizarreness and disruptive discontinuities found in dream reports is provided by the activation-synthesis hypothesis (McCarthy & Hoffman, 1981 sited in Rittenhouse et al). This model (as seen below in Table 1) proposes that dream bizarreness is a psychological correlate of REM state physiology. The most important tenet of the activation-synthesis hypothesis is that during dreaming the activation brain generates its own information by a pontine brain stem neuronal mechani... ... middle of paper ... ... R.W. (1977). The brain as a dream state generator: An activation-synthesis hypothesis of the dream process. The American Journal of Phychiatry, 134, 1335-1348. Reinsel, R., Antrous, J., & Wollman, (1992), Bizarreness in dreams and waking fantasies. In J.A. Antrobus, & M. Bertini (Eds.), The Neuropsychology of sleep and dreaming (pp. 157-183). Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. Rittenhouse, C., Stickgold, R., & Hobson, J. A. (1994). Constraint on the transformation of characters, objects, and seting in dream reports. Consciousness and Cognition, 3, 100-113. Weiten, W. (1998). Psychology: Themes and Variations. (pp.643-649). United States of America: Brooks/Cole Williams, J., Merritt, J., Rittenhouse, C., & Hobson, J.A. (1992). Bizarreness in dreams and waking fantaies: Implicatins for the activation-snthesis hypothesis. Consciousness and Cognition, 1, 172
Webb, W. B., & Cartwright, R. D. (1978). Sleep and Dreams. Annual Review of Psychology, 29(1), 223-252. doi:10.1146/annurev.ps.29.020178.001255
Have you ever experienced a dream or a nightmare that seemed like reality? Most people in the world today would say that they have. Although this realistic dream experience does not occur often, when it does, clear distinctions are hard to make between the dream and reality. Theories exist that explain dreams as our subconscious
dreams, and terrifying our thoughts, they have drawn up to relate to some of our darkest fantasies
Everybody dreams during his lifetime. It is a part of human nature that we experience almost everyday. Dreams can be lost memories, past events and even fantasies that we relive during our unconscious hours of the day. As we sleep at night, a new world shifts into focus that seems to erase the physical and moral reality of our own. It is an individual's free mind that is privately exposed, allowing a person to roam freely in his own universe. As we dream, it seems that we cannot distinguish right from wrong or normal from abnormal and, therefore, commit acts that we would not have done in a realistic society. Perhaps Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, describes the nature of dreams best. He contemplates the definition of insanity by saying, "... May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which is the sleeping life?" He is suggesting that our dreams display a sense of mindless behavior, and an insane person could be one who does not realize he is awake and thinks he is still dreaming. Alice, the main character in these two books, is caught in her own lapse of reality and sanity. She is engulfed in a mass of items and events that she has experienced in the real world that have conformed to the environment of her own imagination. They are brought to life in a distorted way in her imaginative world of Wonderland. Throughout these stories, Alice encounters characters and landscapes that are created from her own view on nature and the behavior of people as she knows it. Alice dreams of animals taking the roles of adults and a misshapen landscape of unusual foliage and shifting conditions in propo...
Matalon, Nadav. "The Riddle Of Dreams." Philosophical Psychology 24.4 (2011): 517-536. Academic Search Complete. Web. 30 Apr. 2014.
Condensation and displacement are two types of transformation, which connect to the different structure level of the dreams (the manifest contents and the latent dream-thoughts). They are used to “encode” the dreams and “repress” the consciousness. Condensation is one or more common elements that are packed together forming a composite picture with contradictory details when constructing a dream-situation. Condensation, as Freud describes, “is the most important and peculiar characteristics of the dream-work” (154). Besides condensation, displacement has its own significance. The dream content seems to have a different centre from its dream-thoughts (155) within displacement. The latent dream-thoughts are pr...
Exploringn a Neurobiological Theory of Dreaming Neurobiological theory of dreaming focuses on the brain and the nervous system. The activation synthesis theory which is one of the theories put forward by Hobson and Mcarley (1998) said sleep is controlled by mechanism in the brainstem. When activated this inhibits activity in the skeletal muscles and increases activity in the forebrain. This theory seems dreaming as an automatic part of the sleep process that may have no significance beyond the need to organize the material into coherent forms. Hobson points out that injection of a drug that increases the action of acetylcholine both increases REM sleep and dreaming.
Psychology, neuroscience try to explain them, 2012). He studied dreams to better understand aspects of personality as they relate to pathology. Freud believed that every action is motivated by the unconscious at a certain level. In order to be successful in a civilized society, the urges and desires of the unconscious mind must be repressed. Freud believed that dreams are manifestations of urges and desires that are suppressed in the unconscious. Freud categorized the mind into three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. When one is awake, the impulses if the id are suppressed by the superego, but during dreams, one may get a glimpse into the unconscious mind, or the id. The unconscious has the opportunity to express hidden desires of the id during dreaming. Freud believed that the id can be so disturbing at times that the id’s content can be translated into a more acceptable form. This censor leads to a sometimes confusing and strange dream image. According to Freud, the reason one may struggle to remember a dream is because the superego protects the conscious mind from the disturbance of the unconscious mind (Dream Theories,
Based on On Dreams, written by Sigmund Freud, and Spellbound, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, provide the most psychological significant aspect of dreams through the theory of dreams made by Freud. I partially agree with Freud’s theory on dreams and the dreaming process. Dreams have the ability to form a bridge from reality to transfer over to the unconscious mindset. Throughout his article, On Dreams, he gives explanations behind his theory. The human psyche has a vital role in psychology, including the way humans interpret dreams and their sequence.
During Freud’s time, society typically viewed dreams as an intervention of a higher being or entity (Freud, 1900, p.4). However, Freud made the claim that dreams are the product of the dreamer and also that it serves two purposes. First, dreams form to keep a person asleep at night by blocking out external stimuli, much in the same way a person consciously does when turning off the light and minimizing noise before going to bed (“Freud’s Approach,” 2000). Next, Freud (1900) viewed humans as having grotesque sexual urges that “are suppressed before they are perceived” (p.37) in order to protect the person and allow him or her to get along in society; however, dreams serve the purpose of releasing these repressed desires as wishes which are disguised in the dream. Because a person cannot readily be aware of the unconscious wish, the dream is divided into two ...
Fisher, C.J., Byrne, A., Edwards, and Kahn, E. (1970) REM and NREM nightmares. In E. Hartman (ed), Sleep and Dreaming. Boston : Little Brown
Some others will have artificial insomnia since they are awakened by their nightmares, so they cannot go back to sleep again. Moreover, if a person is more empathetic and more in tune with their surroundings, nightmares might be occurred into their sleep. There are also two dramatically various sorts of nightmare experience on both the neurophysiological and the subjective psychological level, one of which takes place in REM sleep and the other during stage four. It has been demonstrated that nightmare dreams happen during all sleep stages. “However, the most severe type of nightmare experience is confined to the deepest stage of non dreaming sleep; stage 4” (Kellerman 1987). In addition, these nightmares reflect on disturbing dreams that also represent a failure of normal dreaming activities. Nightmares have no certain purpose in themselves because they are inappropriate byproducts of a further normal dream process that goes awry (McNamara 2008). Nevertheless, nightmares are still a universal human experience, and they are one of the less understood with the aspect of psychological phenomena because they have existed for a long
Schneider, A., & Domhoff, G. W. (2014). The Quantitative Study of Dreams. Retrieved April 23, 2014 From http://www.dreamresearch.net/
In this Forum on Sleep and Dreams, we will see how the diversity of academic disciplines can help to answer important questions about sleep and dreaming—questions that may touch the basis of human intellect. The Forum is fortunate in...
Sigmund Freud's dream theory "the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious; it is the secret foundation of psychoanalysis" (Gardner, Skeptical, 10). But earlier efforts have been m...