DREAMS�Module 1.5c

Dream Facts:�

• 25% of your night’s sleep or 2 hours is spent dreaming.
• Sleep Thinking – Vague, uncreative, bland thoughts about real-life events that take place in NREM. Occur more than dreams.
• Dreams have 5 basic characteristics:
• Emotions can be intense
• Content & Organization are usually illogical
• Bizarre details are uncritically accepted
• Sensations are sometimes bizarre
• Dream images are difficult to remember
• Dreams occur in both NREM and REM sleep however they are more frequent and last longer in REM.
• People usually have 4-5 episodes of dreaming a night.

Brain During REM Sleep�

• PET scans reveal that brain activity is much different in REM sleep than when you’re awake.
• Frontal Lobe and Primary Visual Cortex (registers visual info from retinas) are essentially shut down during REM meaning you are shut out from the external world and rational thought so you accept your dreams no matter how bizarre they are.
• Amygdala & hippocampus of the limbic system which deal with emotion and memory are highly active as are the brain’s visual areas.

What do we Dream About?�

• Most dreams are about everyday life.
• Some themes are found across cultures.
• Dream more about failures than successes
• Aggression is more common than friendliness in dreams.
• Environmental cues during dreaming may be incorporated into the dream.

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Why don’t we remember our dreams?

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• Areas of the brain used in forming memories (frontal lobe) are shut down during REM sleep and neurotransmitters that are used to make memories are greatly reduced.
• More likely to remember a dream if you wake up during it.
• Visual encoders tend to be better at remembering dreams.
• Vivid dreams are more likely to be recalled.
• Distractions when you awaken can cause problems with remembering dreams.
• Brain seems programmed to forget most of what occurs during sleep.

Types of Dreams

• True dream—vivid, detailed dreams consisting of sensory and motor sensations experienced during REM
• Sleep thought—lacks vivid sensory and motor sensations, is more similar to daytime thinking, and occurs during slow-wave sleep
• Lucid dreaming- dreamer controls what happens in the dream. Learn how here (2 min)

Dream Theories

Psychoanalytic Interpretation

• Sigmund Freud – Dreams are the fulfillment of wishes.
• Unacceptable thoughts of sex & aggression are repressed when you are conscious but come forth when you are asleep in the form of dreams.
• “safety valve” that allowed for the release of unconscious and unacceptable urges.
• Dreams were “the royal road to the unconsciousness”
• Two components of Dreams
1. Manifest Content – actual dream images themselves
2. Latent Content – Disguised psychological meaning of the dream.
• Research does not support his theories.

Information-Processing Theory

• Dreams serve an important memory - by sorting and sifting through the day’s experiences and consolidating them into LTM
• Rehearse Stressful Situations
• Helps with learning NEW info
• Research suggests REM sleep helps memory storage (Long-Term Potentiation).
• Areas active during learning also active during dream
• This has been studied with Rats in a Maze (4 min)

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Physiological Function Theory

• Neural activity during REM sleep provides periodic stimulation of the brain.
• Helps with neural development & preserving neural pathways (especially true for infants).

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Physiological Function Theory

Activation Synthesis Model�

• Brain activity during sleep produces dream images (activation) which are combined by the brain into a dream story (synthesis). – Bottom-Up
• Meaning is to be found by analyzing the way the dreamer makes sense of the progression of chaotic dream images.

OR, to put it another way:

• Activation of brain stem area (Pons) arouse other brain areas including visual and auditory and limbic systems.
• Brain responds to these internally created signals and assigns them meaning using memories, emotions and sensations.

Activation-Synthesis Theory

• Neural Activation Theory
• Dreams are the mind’s attempt to make sense of random neural firings in the brain as one sleeps.

Cognitive Development Theory

• Dreams draw upon a person’s knowledge and understanding of their experiences and are useful for cognitive development
• Children dream in pictures while adults dream with language & conversation being more of a focal point
• A Top-Down way of dreaming where our concepts and knowledge simulate our current reality in our dream
• Our dreams become more mature as we mature.

Dream Research

• Play “What’s in a Dream?” (13:00)
• Segment #14 from Scientific American Frontiers DVD or 30:25-43:55 online)
• Dream research with Alan Alda.
• What happens biologically when we dream during REM sleep?
• Where do stories of our dreams come from?
• How brains try to make sense of nonsense.
• What kind of tasks are more difficult if you have random sleep loss?
• Can dreaming help us learn?

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