Warm Up
• What are the Universal Biological Clocks?
• Are you a Lark or an Owl? Why?
• Why do we sleep?
Dreams and Dreaming
Defined in Webster's Dictionary as
• a "sequence of sensations, images, thoughts,
etc., passing through a sleeping person's
mind"
Oneirology
The scientific
discipline of
dream research
The most famous
dream researcher was
Freud
Two Parts of a Dream
(according to Freud)
Manifest Content
– the remembered storyline of a dream
– who’s in the dream, what happens
Two Parts of a Dream
Latent Content
–the underlying
meaning of a
dream
The mc is the representation of the lc
thus disguising the real meaning of the
dream
Dream Interpretation
This type of therapy
is dangerous…why??
Types of Dreams
Daydreams
– a level of consciousness between
sleep and wakefulness.
– It occurs during our waking hours
when we let our imagination carry
us away
Why do we daydream?
• They can help us prepare for
future events
• They can substitute for
impulsive behavior
Lucid Dreams
• The conscious perception of one's state
while dreaming
– occurs when you realize you are dreaming
– "Wait a second. This is only a dream!"
– results in a much clearer ("lucid") experience
and usually enables direct control over the
content of the dream
Lucid Dreams
Vanilla Sky- Lucid
Dreams>
Nightmares
• Dreams of particular intensity, with content that
the sleeper finds disturbing
– related either to physiological causes, such as a high
fever
– or to psychological ones, such as unusual trauma or
stress in the sleeper's life
Reoccurring Dreams
• Recurring dreams
repeat themselves
with little variation
in story or theme.
Have You had one???
Dreams of Absent Minded
Transgression (DAMT)
• Dreams where the individual
dreaming absent mindedly
performs an action that they have
been trying to stop – withdrawal
dreams
• (a classic example is a smoker
trying to quit dreams of lighting a
cigarette).
• Subjects that have had DAMT
dreams have reported awaking
with intense feelings of guilt
Fantasy Prone Personalities
• Someone who imagines
and recalls experiences
with lifelike vividness and
who spends considerable
time fantasizing
To Satisfy our own Wishes
“Wish-fulfillment theory”
•
•
Freud – “dreams are the key to understanding our
inner conflicts”
Dreams are our expressions of our wishes
To File away Memories
Information –processing Theory
– sorting and sifting through
information to aid memory
storage or memory removal
To Develop and preserve neural
pathways
Physiological function theory
•
provides stimulation for our brain
To make sense of random
activity in the brain
Activation-synthesis Theory
•
•
The minds attempt to make
sense of random neural
activity
This might explain why many
dreams do not make sense