Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Dreams have a foresight function, enabling us to find a way out of an immediate conflict. [I 2] To reduce the polysemy of the term, Jung sometimes speaks of the "intuitive function" of dreams. [G 3] This prospective function is not in fact a premonitory dream, but teaches the dreamer a path to follow. [2]
The characteristics of REM sleep consistently contain a similar set of features. While dreaming, people regularly falsely believe that they are awake unless they implement lucidity. Dreams contain multimodal pseudo-perceptions; sometimes any or all sensory modalities are present, but most often visual and motoric. [9]
This includes the activation synthesis theory—the theory that dreams result from brain stem activation during REM sleep; the continual activation theory—the theory that dreaming is a result of activation and synthesis but dreams and REM sleep are controlled by different structures in the brain; and dreams as excitations of long-term memory ...
People have proposed many hypotheses about the functions of dreaming. Sigmund Freud postulated that dreams are the symbolic expression of frustrated desires that have been relegated to the unconscious mind , and he used dream interpretation in the form of psychoanalysis in attempting to uncover these desires.
This was observed by two experiments: development of sleepiness after dopamine neuron destruction in substantia nigra in the midbrain, and discovery of the reticular activating system, which are visual cues received through our eyes and to our brain that begin the waking process, that waking consciousness depends sleep.
Congenitally blind people, who do not typically have visual imagery in their dreams, still move their eyes in REM sleep. [15] An alternative explanation suggests that the functional purpose of REM sleep is for procedural memory processing, and the rapid eye movement is only a side effect of the brain processing the eye-related procedural memory.
Humans spend about two hours dreaming per night, [2] and each dream lasts around 5–20 minutes, although the dreamer may perceive the dream as being much longer than this. [3] The content and function of dreams have been topics of scientific, philosophical and religious interest throughout recorded history.
Research into dreams includes exploration of the mechanisms of dreaming, the influences on dreaming, and disorders linked to dreaming. Work in oneirology overlaps with neurology and can vary from quantifying dreams to analyzing brain waves during dreaming, to studying the effects of drugs and neurotransmitters on sleeping or dreaming.