First, I am going to start out with the definition of Psychology. Psychology is the scientific study of the human mind and its functions. Speaking of the human mind and its functions, dreams, what are they? Dreams are a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person’s mind during sleep. Dreams are very mysterious, they are the “royal road to… the unconscious,” a famed psychologist once said (Sigmund Freud). Still, what is the meaning behind dreams? Some believe that dreams have certain meanings, some believe that dreams are some sort of wish fulfillment, but others believe that dreams are just random images from electrical activity going on in the brain. There are people who try to interpret dreams, called psychotherapists
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The psychoanalytic perspective, Sigmund Freud’s theory, states that dreams are representing the unconscious desires, thoughts, and motivations of people. Two of the main components in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory are manifest and latent content. Manifest content is the actual images and thoughts within the dream, where the latent content is the hidden psychological meaning behind the dream. The activation- synthesis model is another popular theory. According to this theory about dreams, first proposed by Robert McClarley and J. Allen Hobson in 1977, different circuits in the brain become activated and that causes areas involved with emotions, sensations, and memories to become active during REM sleep. The brain interprets the activity and tries to find the meaning behind the signals which then creates dreams. Hobson, one of the proposers of the activation- synthesis model, believes that dreaming is “…our most creative conscious state, one in which the chaotic, spontaneous recombination of cognitive elements produces novel configurations of information: new ideas.” (J. Allen Hobson). The information- processing theories suggest that we sleep, because sleeping is our way of processing all of the information that happened throughout the day. Experts say that dreams are just a way to manage the activity that is going on inside our brains while we sleep (Why do we
The psychoanalytic perspective, Sigmund Freud’s theory, states that dreams are representing the unconscious desires, thoughts, and motivations of people. Two of the main components in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory are manifest and latent content. Manifest content is the actual images and thoughts within the dream, where the latent content is the hidden psychological meaning behind the dream. The activation- synthesis model is another popular theory. According to this theory about dreams, first proposed by Robert McClarley and J. Allen Hobson in 1977, different circuits in the brain become activated and that causes areas involved with emotions, sensations, and memories to become active during REM sleep. The brain interprets the activity and tries to find the meaning behind the signals which then creates dreams. Hobson, one of the proposers of the activation- synthesis model, believes that dreaming is “…our most creative conscious state, one in which the chaotic, spontaneous recombination of cognitive elements produces novel configurations of information: new ideas.” (J. Allen Hobson). The information- processing theories suggest that we sleep, because sleeping is our way of processing all of the information that happened throughout the day. Experts say that dreams are just a way to manage the activity that is going on inside our brains while we sleep (Why do we