It is then hypothesized that dreams that people have are actually memories or experiences that have been suppressed by the mind and captured by the subconscious. They are ‘alive’ in our brains but due to any number of reasons we are not conscious of them. Yet, when we sleep, these recessive memories become dominant and create a cognitive situation that can be controlled to change action during the waking period. [2]
Yet, recent research has shown that REM and dreams are not the same . During periods of rapid eye movement sleep--REM sleep--which is, a period of sleeps in which humans, also dream. What happened was that these patterns were replayed and the pattern of brain activity was taken lifted out, carried over to the patterns that were produced and then when the animal was awake and lined up the animals in fact, replayed memories of past experience.
Solms has studied patients who have brain damage to the pons, which renders them incapable of REM sleep. Yet those people still dream. Other people with damage to higher parts of the brain can't dream. But they do experience REM sleep. Researchers have also found that REM sleep is not the exclusive province of dreams. Although most dreams happen then, people also dream at other times during sleep. [3]
One of the most recent theories in dream interpretation, for example, is based on a technique called lucid dreaming. Experts believe that if we can become cognizant of dreaming while we are in the process, we can actually take control of the action in our dream and change the outcome. This in turn can alter, and even heal, our waking attitudes toward the person orsituation that gave rise to the dream.
One theory explains that during dreaming the parts of the brain involved in emotions and emotional memories are active. That explains why dreams can feel so intense and powerful. The areas involved in recognizing objects and processing images are also active -- which is consistent with the strong visual nature of dreams. [4]
Meanwhile, the areas that are executive regions of the brain are deactivated . That might help explain why dreams are often illogical, irrational and out of sequence. All of those observations are roughly consistent with Freud's idea of dreams as messages from the unconscious mind. But contrary to what Freud might have predicted, the part of the brain involved in processing symbols is relatively quiet during dreaming. Freud believed that dreams were full of symbols that had to be decoded to reveal the innermost workings of the mind.
Dreams may be meaningful, but they're not meaningful in the way Freud thought. The meaning of dreams is right on the surface. In other words, a cigar is always just a cigar. [5]
Dreaming itself is a subjective experience. We experience dreams in our ability to recall and kind of relate the content. And the fact that we are replaying experience, that is memories of past events, during periods of dream sleep, that is sleep during which we would experience dreams,
Dreams at sleep onset, first of all, are very stereotyped. Everybody sees the same thing with remarkable precision. And you don't have to have a hippocampus to do it. So for this particular type of dreaming, it looks like it’s entirely what we call cortical structure, areas on the surface of the brain or the bumpy area--people usually think of it as the brain. But those are the regions and those are the memory systems involved in putting these dreams together.
There's a strong communication pathway between the cortex and the hippocampus. Interestingly, during REM sleep, most of the information seems to flow from the cortex into the hippocampus so it might be that if rats dream, that as they're dreaming they're sending copies of this back down into the hippocampus and the hippocampus is replaying it and consolidating, strengthening and stabilizing those memories. [6]
The Freudian notions that sleep and dreaming actually reflect the hidden process of memory re-evaluation; that it's problem-solving that we're not necessarily thinking about. We can relate to that because we don't tend to remember dreams. But they're actually carrying on this function. Now the question actually came up very early on of whether (technical difficulties) conscious of this. What we see through the results of the experiment that rats are forming these memories of sequences of events that allow them to replay, as the previous caller mentioned, things in the past in detail, accurate detail as to how it happened. But they may not be conscious of it. But nonetheless it makes for improving their performance.
Conclusion
In a just-completed study, Tore Nielsen, director of the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory at the Sacre-Coeur Hospital Sleep Disorders Center in Montreal, compared the typical dreams of 1996 college students with those of 1958 college students. Results: College students are having the same dreams, at about the same frequency, as they were 40 years ago. One striking difference: College women today dream about sex twice as often as their 1958 counterparts. Our brains gather events and characters from daily headlines, blend them with incidents from our own lives, and recast them into perennial dream scenarios. When we dream of current events, it's because they remind us of unresolved emotional events in our lives, Cartwright says. "If the current events don't relate to an earlier incident, they won't show up in our dreams."
[7]
What do these dreams mean? There's no one answer, because different people react in different ways to the same news event. What connection can you draw between the dream and events in your past? “When you fit the dream into the context of your life, the dream becomes less a mystery and more a reflection of who you are," Nielsen says.
[8]
References
- Robert Miller Memory Consolidation and REM Sleep Second Web Reports On Serendip Biology 202 1998
- William J. Cromie Research Links Sleep, Dreams, and Learning Gazette Staff 1998 President and Fellows of Harvard College
- Blagrove, Mark, The Functions of Dreaming.(book reviews). Vol. 87, British Journal of Psychology, 05-01-1996, pp 345(4).
- Robert P. Vertes Sleep and Memory (Part 1) MEMORY CONSOLIDATION IN REM SLEEP: DREAM ON Center for Complex Systems Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL 33431
- THOM GEIER MYSTERIES OF SCIENCE what is sleep for? Insomniacs hoping for some shuteye might do well to count sleep theories instead of sheep US NEWS ONLINE
- THOM GEIER MYSTERIES OF SCIENCE What is sleep for? Insomniacs hoping for some shuteye might do well to count sleep theories instead of sheep US NEWS ONLINE
- Deborah Halber MIT News Office Animals have complex dreams, MIT researcher proves Study may advance understanding of human learning and memory JANUARY 24, 2001
- Jim Horne the Phenomena of Human Sleep the Karger Gazette - April 1997
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