Dreams are the one place in life where anyone can escape. Why not learn what dreams mean? As stated in the book Beginner’s Guide to Dream Analysis by Sigmund Freud, dream analysis is the process of assigning meanings to dreams. Pamela Ball stated in her book 10,000 Dreams Interpreted, that dreams are said to be the mind's way of making sense of the various issues it deals with at any given time--be it work, family, health, or relationships. Dreams help sort out all the information and events that are inputted during waking hours, creating a way for a person, free of conscious limitations, to understand what is really going on, to solve problems, to gain clarity and insight into a situation, issue, or other human being. The interpretations within dream analysis are based on everyday influences. Some of these influences include drugs and vitamins, sleeping position, personality, sounds, smells, and state of mind. There is a host of ways in which pharmaceuticals can influence dreams. Nicorette, for example, tends to make people experience intensely vivid dreams. Drugs can also affect dream recall. According to Lauri Loewenberg, a certified dream analyst and member of the International Association for the Study Dreams, “Since depression makes a person less likely to remember his or her dreams, anti-depressants can counteract that effect. Vitamin B6 has also been shown to help people remember their dreams more vividly and easily.” A recent study from Hong Kong found that if someone sleeps on his stomach it will increase the chances he will have a sexual dream or a dream about being persecuted. Examples of themes mentioned in the study include “having a sexual relationship with a big wheel or celebrity,” “being smothered, u... ... middle of paper ... ...Publications, 2003. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Macmillian CO. 1937. Parker, Alice Anne. Understand Your Dreams. California: H.J. Kramer, 2001. “6 Things That Influence Your Dreams.” huffingtonpost.com. 28 Sept. 2013. Huffington Post. 2 April 2014. . “What Dreams Say About Personality.” health,howstuffworks.com. 16 August 2005. How Stuff Works, Inc. 2 April 2014. . “What Do Your Dreams Mean? Here’s How You Can Decode Them.” healthland.time.com. 9 Dec 2013. TIME. 27 Feb 2014. . Ball, Pamela J. 10,000 Dreams Interpreted. London, GB: Random House Value Publishing, 1 October 2000.
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 woken up feeling like you’ve been to the end of the world and back, yet never left your bed? Or maybe you might have had all your worst fears realized when you were asleep? In that case, you were probably dreaming. Dreams are a “series of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations occurring involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep” (The American Heritage High School Dictionary, 2004). Everyone has about three to seven dreams a night, but it has been estimated that we forget up to 95 percent of them ( Stevens 2011). Although no one really knows why we dream every night, it’s more likely than not a way for our brain to help us solve problems.
The average person spends over one-third of their life sleeping, and over this period of time he or she can have over 1,825 dreams (Wicklinski). By definition, dreams are mental images, thoughts, or emotions that are experienced while sleeping. In the beginning, dreams were thought to be messages sent from the gods or spirit world. Researchers now have many theories explaining why people dream. Many of these theories explain that dreams can resemble an individual’s sensory experiences or even secret wishes. All people dream, but only 42% of people can recall their dreams from the night before (“Dreams”). The study of dreams is a topic that is constantly being debated by researchers for many reasons. Dreaming is important because it can impact people’s health, provide insight into what they are feeling, and reveal information about their behavior.
Have you ever wondered why you dream and how you can sometimes direct it? Maybe you have wondered if your dream has any true meaning to it. You are not the only person who has these questions. These questions come up a lot when psychologists discuss the topic of dreaming. The topic of dreams and lucid dreaming has been around for hundreds of years. There have been many books and journals solely devoted to dreams and how they affect people today. The goal for this paper is to answer and explain the questions (Why do you dream? Can you direct your dreams? And do dreams have meanings?) using journals, books, and other resources written by widely known psychologists such as Sigmund Freud.
Dreams have long been a topic of intrigue for artists of all forms. In the literary sense, authors have explored the world of dreams in a plethora of manners, ranging from depicting nonsensical, imaginary worlds to crafting scenes that depict the inner workings of the subconscious mind. In both Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Artist of the Beautiful, the world of dreams is explored through the eyes and thoughts of two curious characters. While Carroll exposes the illogical, absurd elements present in dreams, Hawthorne focuses on the personal, meaningful aspects existing in subconscious thoughts.
Dreams are series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person’s mind during sleep. Dreams occur during a certain stage of sleep known as REM. Several different psychologists, including Freud and Hobson, have studied dreams. Psychologists have provided many theories as to what dreams are and the meanings behind them.
There are many facts that are unknown about dreams and their meanings. For centuries, philosophers and scientists have tried to understand the meaning of dreams. They have all been fascinated by the fact that the content of dreams may have meanings relating to one's life. Are dreams just thoughts in people's minds, or are dreams in fact representations of different areas in people's lives? Dreams represent many different areas of one's life in physical, emotional, and mental ways. Dreams can relay to people facts about their lives that they are not even aware of. There are also many ways that dreams can help cure different physical, emotional, and mental problems in one's life. This paper will discuss dreams and their meanings, and ways of interpreting a dream using such methods as hypnotherapy and psychoanalysis therapy that can help a person in physical, mental, and emotional ways. The first fact that will be discussed is what dreams are and how they work for people in allowing the person to discover more about himself. Dreams can be defined as "a conscious series of images that occur during sleep" (Collier's, vol. 8). Dreams are usually very vivid in color and imagery. They reveal to the dreamer different wishes, concerns, and worries that he or she has. Dreams usually reflect every part of who the dreamer is. The content of the person's dream is usually made up according to how old the dreamer is and how educated the he or she is (Collier's, vol. 8). Dreams are not planned out or thought up. The unconscious part of the mind brings out bits and pieces of information in the dreamer's mind and places them together. According to Encarta, dreams are almost always visual. Forty to fifty percent of dreams have some form of communication present in them and a very small percentage of dreams give the dreamer the ability to use his or her five senses (Encarta). Dreams allow one to take a closer look into his mind and himself in a quest for self-discovery. Dreams can be used to solve all different types of problems. In Sigmund Freud's book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud states: "As regards the dream, all the troubles of waking life are transferred by it to the sleeping state […]" (Freud 113). They relay things about a person that the person may not be able to see.
Dreams have been thought to contain significant messages throughout many cultures. A dream is an unfolding sequence of perceptions, thoughts, and emotions that is experienced as a series of real-life events during sleep. The definitions of dreams are different among studies, which can also lead to quite different results. Perhaps, the dream interpretation has becoming increasingly popular. In this paper, I will talk about what I have learned about three different views of dream interpretations. One theory made by Sigmund Freud who believed that dreams are triggered by unacceptable repressed wishes, often of a sexual nature. He argued that because dreams we experience are merely disguised versions of people real dreams. The other theory called activation–synthesis theory, made by Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley, based on the observation that during REM sleep, many brain-stem circuits become active and bombard the cerebral cortex with neural signals. The last theory, proposed by William Domhoff, is called the neurocognitive theory of dreaming, which demonstrates that dream content in general is continuous with waking conceptions and emotional preoccupations. Thus, dreaming is best understood as a developmental cognitive achievement that depends upon the maintenance of a specific network of forebrain structures. While each theory has different belief system and approach method, it is a great opportunity to know how former psychologists contributed to the field of dream interpretation.
...esults. One interesting thing found, is that although it is though that dreams happen in a blink of an eye that they actually happen in a realistic time span (General Information). Another is that dreams generally take place in familiar settings and are random leftover thoughts from the previous day. What’s interesting though, is that during studies in which participants were woken on a regular basis, scientists found that the dreams remembered the following morning were “more coherent, sexier, and generally more interesting” than the dream descriptions that were collected in data for research. Most participants remembered very little of their dreams and only about the last fifteen minutes of dreaming before awoken.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, dream is defined by a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring involuntarily in a person’s mind during certain stages of sleep. Dreams have fascinated humans since the beginning of time. The recorded history of dream interpretation dates back to 3000-4000 B.C. with the Sumerians in Mesopotamia. They documented their dreams on clay tablets. People back then saw the dream world as an extension of reality, but that it was a more powerful realm. Furthermore, they believed that when they dream, their souls would leave their body during sleep and travel to the dream world.
Many people suffer from bad dreams, often referred to as nightmares, every night. It is not uncommon to experience fright filled slumber from time to time, but some people are inclined to suffer more often than an occasional bad dream. While some mental health professionals believe nightmares reduce mental tensions by allowing the mind to act out its fears, new research suggests that bad dreams are more likely to increase anxiety in everyday life. In addition to life’s anxieties, what other factors contribute to nightmares and why?
Dreaming is very different than everyday life, yet somehow still relates to it in some way. In everyday life we have stress and happiness along with many other emotions. Yet in someway when we drift off into a deep sleep this emotions come right back. Dalai Lama once said that “sleep is the best meditation.” Sleep may be the one thing that people turn to, a place where your mind is totally set free to do what it wants and think what it wants. An idea or vision that is created in your imagination that when suddenly when you awake, feels so real.Dream reflect reality because most peoples dreams are in fact related to past, and recent experiences, or events that have happened in a person’s life. Dreams are more than just a method of entertainment, They should be taken more seriously because of the fact that with dreams imitating own reality, you can then learn more about yourself.
First, let examined the definition of dream according to Sigmund Freud “dream is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish. Dreams are constructed like a neurotic symptom: they are compromises between the demands of a repressed impulse and the resistance of a censoring force in the ego” (Freud, 28). This simple means that all dreams represent the fulfilment of a wish by the dreamer. Dreams are the mind way of keeping an individual asleep and to digest and work out all that we have going on inside our brains, the negative, positive, fear and unclear thoughts and actions. This set the framework for dream work. Freud also stresses that even anxiety dreams and nightmares are expressions of unconscious desire. Freud further went on to say that, “the general function of dreaming is to fending off, by a kind of soothing action, external or internal stimuli which would tend to arose the sleeper, and thus of securing sleep against interpretation” (Freud, 28). With this, it shows that a dreamer can take apart his dream and analysis it, if he or she remembers, once conscious.
For thousands of years humans have experienced a phenomenon which we describe today as dreaming. It has puzzled and sparked interest to all whom experience it. For as long as people have been dreaming, there have been people trying to understand and interpret them. This research paper examines the causation and deeper meaning of dreams. It will compare and contrast the differentiating ideas on the subject by famous psychologists and also examine first-hand accounts from real individuals. The objective of paper is to shed some light on this complex and bizarre behavior.
All of us dream, several times at night. It is believed by some that we sleep in order that we may dream. Dreams can come true if somebody makes them true, as the saying goes, “A dream is just a dream, unless you make it come true”. Dreams provide us the actual picture of our thoughts. Dreams may tell us about any physical event which took place with us or which is going to happen with us. The dream is trying to inform the dreamer about his condition in any walk of life. Basically, we can dream about anything logical or illogical, fictious or non-fictious and reasonable or unreasonable.