States of Consciousness

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• Chapter 7
• States of Consciousness

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Dreams

• What are dreams made of?

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Dreams Freud

• Sigmund Freud--The Interpretation of Dreams
  (1900)
• wish fulfillment
• discharge otherwise unacceptable feelings
• Manifest Content
• remembered story line
• Latent Content
• underlying meaning

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Dreams Freud

• Dreams
• Dream is a safe outlet for the mind
• Deals with unacceptable thoughts and emotions
• Manifest content is the dressed up symbolic
  version of the unconscious
• Most adult dreams have strong sexual undertones
• Dream interpenetration is the royal road to the
  unconscious

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Dreams Information processing

• As Information Processing
• Dreams serve to sift and sort memories of our
  daily experiences
• Helps us to better process and store memories and
  learning from the previous day

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Dreams Information processing

• Support for theory
• REM sleep increases following a stressful
  experience and intense learning experiences
• People will perform worse on a memory test if
  kept from dreaming the night before

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Dreams Activation-synthesis

• Neural activity is random and dreams are your
  brains attempt to make sense of it
• Your brain tries to impose meaning on meaningless
  stimuli

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Dreams Activation-synthesis

• Support
• Eye movement of REM sleep coincides with bursts
  of neural activity in the visual cortex
• Would account for random and bizarre occurrences
  in dreams

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Dreams Physiological Function

• Dreams serve to provide neural stimulation for a
  sleeping brain
• Stimulation of the neural pathways strengthens
  connections and makes processing faster and more
  efficent

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Dreams Physiological Function

• Support
• Infants and children experience longer periods of
  REM sleep than adults.
• REM sleep periods decrease as we age

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Sleep Across the Lifespan
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Dreams

• So which is the best theory?