Growing up I loved to visit my Grandmother. I loved her with every fiber of me. Her vibe and aura was incredible. So it was natural for me to become the spitting image of her. As I got older I started doing things that she did. I was reading any and everything that was in my path, I could sense things before they even happened, and I had a real deep interest in dreams. So now that I am in college I get to explore those interests a little bit better.
So when my professor Dr. McLeod told us that we would be working on a project of our choice I was ecstatic. I mean what college student wouldn't love to work on what they please. But the only catch was that no matter what our subject was about we had to either put our work on Genius or Twine.
So I started my research on dreams. My subject was constantly switching. It went from dreams to reoccurring dreams, to just dreams as a whole. Now when your discussing dreams you can't do research without Sigmund Freud's “The Interpretation of Dreams” or C.G. Jung's “Dreams”. Everything I read was so fascinating to me. I mean I got the gist of dreams but never really knew why they occurred or why that happened.
In this article I will be talking about dreams as a whole. I did some annotations, and a small presentation on dreams.
So what are dreams? Well “The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology” defines dreams as: “A train of hallucinatory experience with a certain degree of coerce but often confused and bizarre taking place in the condition of sleep and similar condition.”
But according to http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/284378.php dreams are “Dreams are a universal human experience that can be described as a state of consciousness characterized by sensory, cognitive and emotional occurrences during sleep.” As you can see neuroscientific and psychoan*lytic outlooks on dreams are drastically different. Neuroscientists focus on the structures involved in dream production and dream organization and narratability. While people like Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung focused on the context of the dreams and the relation between the dreamer and the dream.
In C.G. Jung's “The an*lysis of Dreams”:
"The dream far from being the confusion of haphazard and meaningless a**ociations it is commonly believed to be or a result merely of somatic sensation during sleep as many authors suppose is an autonomous and meaningful product of the psychic activity susceptible like all other psychic functions a systematic an*lysis. The organic sensation felt during sleep are not the cause of the dream; they play but a secondary role and furnish only elements upon which the psyche works."
Also author Pamela Ball say in her book “10,000 Dream Interpretation” that “dreams are a kind of white noise or background hum similar to that which emanates from any piece of electrical equipment.”
As you can see there are many different views on dreams and what they are. I personally like Sigmund Freud's description of dreams. In the early 1900's he created a topographical model in which he described the human minds function and structure. You see he divided the mind into three different categories. The “Superego, Ego and Id” these are the components that make up what Freud describes as the unconscious mind. You see according to Freud the Superego, Id, and Ego plays a major role in our dreams.
The Id is the unconscious part of our mind in which we repress desires, wishes, s**ual urges, and primal urges. When we dream the unconscious mind comes out and reveals our deepest desires. When that occurs our Superego steps in and sensors our dreams thus keeping our desires and urges hidden.This process is why dreams are quite confusing and very hard to remember. So where does the “Ego” come in the picture? The ego is concerned with the conscious mind. When we wake up the conscious mind tries to remember what happened in the dream but the superego is at work keeping the real images of the id hidden.
When do we dream? As we sleep our minds and body goes through five stages! Stages 1-4 and lastly REM. You can dream during the 5 stages of sleep. But most dreamers remember the dreams that occurred during REM sleep. In REM sleep the dreamer eyes move rapidly and the muscles are temporary paralyzed. So when your sleep but it feels like you cant move your body - contrary to the belief that a witch is on your back- you are actually in REM sleep and your muscles are locked.
What are Recurring Dreams? Have your ever had a dream over and over again. But you cant quite understand why you are having the dream so much? Well according to http://www.dreamdictionary.org/dreaming/recurring-dreams/ Recurring dreams are "a type of dream that we have on a regular basis when we sleep. The majority of our recurring dreams usually appears as a nightmare or a very unpleasant dream. Our dreams are said to be manifestation of thoughts and images in the brain that organizes them in a database. Many people who have explored their dreams would tell you that our dreams contain messages from our unconscious mind to our conscious mind using dream symbols."
As you can see dreams play a major role in our life. They show us many things and help us understand many things. They might be confusing or even weird but the are a part of us.