One of the questions humans have asked themselves throughout their existence is why do dreams happen and do they mean anything? The Mesopotamians believed that dreams were messages from the gods about the future, and the Egyptians believed the same. Aristotle, a famous Greek philosopher, thought that dreams are the purest form of wisdom, and that they can be used to predict the future. Another Greek philosopher named Hippocrates was one of the first people to believe that dreams indicated a person’s mental and physical health. There are so many theories, so what is the real reason why dreams occur? There are three main theories on why dreams happen. Sigmund Freud proposed that a person’s unconscious desires controlled dreams, Carl Jung theorized
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Basically, dreams are images created in the brain during sleep that can incorporate different senses.
Considered the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud is one of the most well-known names of psychology. His theory on why people dream was created around 1899 and is still widely accepted, yet there is little scientific reason behind it. Freud considered dreams to be psychologically necessary for humans. To understand Freud’s theory on dreams, first one must understand his ideas in general. Freud believed that everyone has a conscious, a preconscious, and an unconscious. The conscious is everything that a person is currently aware of. The preconscious is everything that can be recovered from memory, and the unconscious consists of desires and primitive wishes. Freud thought that every action and thought are influenced by the unconscious. These three levels of the mind can be compared to an iceberg where the conscious is everything above water, the preconscious is in-between above the water and below the water, and the unconscious is everything below the water. This part of …show more content…
The main people behind this theory are J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley, and they created this theory in 1977, much later than Freud and Jung. The activation-synthesis theory says that PGO waves are produced in REM sleep, then are interpreted by the cerebral cortex and essentially wake up higher level neurons. PGO stands for pons (the part of the brain stem associated with consciousness), lateral geniculate (part of the brain that interprets images of the retina), and occipital cortex (a part of the brain that processes visual information). The higher level neurons create dreams through visual images and sounds. The activation-synthesis theory also explains why dreams can seem so logical during the dream but illogical when remembered. The neurons in the pre frontal cortex, the part of the brain that interprets how logical a situation is, are not woken up, so the brain is doing little reasoning during a dream (Berman). Although this theory is based on physiology and not psychology, there are some emotional ties to dreaming. When the PGO waves are going off, there are neurons in the hippocampus and amygdala firing. The hippocampus and amygdala are part of the body’s limbic system which deals with memories, emotions, and motivations. Since the neurons are active in both of these structures, all of these things affect dreams. Ultimately, dreams could just be a
Basically, dreams are images created in the brain during sleep that can incorporate different senses.
Considered the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud is one of the most well-known names of psychology. His theory on why people dream was created around 1899 and is still widely accepted, yet there is little scientific reason behind it. Freud considered dreams to be psychologically necessary for humans. To understand Freud’s theory on dreams, first one must understand his ideas in general. Freud believed that everyone has a conscious, a preconscious, and an unconscious. The conscious is everything that a person is currently aware of. The preconscious is everything that can be recovered from memory, and the unconscious consists of desires and primitive wishes. Freud thought that every action and thought are influenced by the unconscious. These three levels of the mind can be compared to an iceberg where the conscious is everything above water, the preconscious is in-between above the water and below the water, and the unconscious is everything below the water. This part of …show more content…
The main people behind this theory are J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley, and they created this theory in 1977, much later than Freud and Jung. The activation-synthesis theory says that PGO waves are produced in REM sleep, then are interpreted by the cerebral cortex and essentially wake up higher level neurons. PGO stands for pons (the part of the brain stem associated with consciousness), lateral geniculate (part of the brain that interprets images of the retina), and occipital cortex (a part of the brain that processes visual information). The higher level neurons create dreams through visual images and sounds. The activation-synthesis theory also explains why dreams can seem so logical during the dream but illogical when remembered. The neurons in the pre frontal cortex, the part of the brain that interprets how logical a situation is, are not woken up, so the brain is doing little reasoning during a dream (Berman). Although this theory is based on physiology and not psychology, there are some emotional ties to dreaming. When the PGO waves are going off, there are neurons in the hippocampus and amygdala firing. The hippocampus and amygdala are part of the body’s limbic system which deals with memories, emotions, and motivations. Since the neurons are active in both of these structures, all of these things affect dreams. Ultimately, dreams could just be a