AKSA BABU

WHY DO WE DREAM?

PRESENTED BY: AKSA BABU

DREAM

A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. The content and function of dreams are not fully understood, although they have been a topic of scientific, philosophical, and religious interest throughout recorded history.

DREAM - A Mystery

Dreaming is still a mystery of human cognition, although it has been studied experimentally for more than a century. Experimental psychology first investigated dream content and frequency. The neuroscientific approach to dreaming arose at the end of the 1950s and soon proposed a physiological substrate of dreaming: rapid eye movement sleep. Fifty years later, this hypothesis was challenged because it could not explain all of the characteristics of dream reports.

DREAM - A Mystery

The neurophysiological correlates of dreaming are still unclear, and many questions remain unresolved.

• Do the representations that constitute the dream emerge randomly from the brain, or do they surface according to certain parameters?
• Is the organization of the dream’s representations chaotic or is it determined by rules?
• Does dreaming have a meaning?
• What is/are the function(s) of dreaming?

Psychoanalysis provides hypotheses to address these questions.

psychoanalytic hypotheses

Until now, these hypotheses have received minimal attention in cognitive neuroscience, but the recent development of neuropsychoanalysis brings new hopes of interaction between the two fields. Considering the psychoanalytical perspective in cognitive neuroscience would provide new directions and leads for dream research and would help to achieve a comprehensive understanding of dreaming. Notably, several subjective issues at the core of the psychoanalytic approach, such as the concept of personal meaning, the concept of unconscious episodic memory, and the subject’s history, are not addressed or considered in cognitive neuroscience. This paper argues that the focus on singularity and personal meaning in psychoanalysis is needed to successfully address these issues in cognitive neuroscience and to progress in the understanding of dreaming and the psyche.

What causes vivid Dreams ?

In dream reports, however, one often notices banal situations, strange scenes, or even frightening events. Why is there such a contrast between the popular meaning of the word “dream” and the content of dream reports? Why are some dream scenes so bizarre? Are dreams built from images that arise randomly from the sleeping brain? Or is the emergence and organization of dream images controlled by currently unknown parameters? Does dreaming have a function?Answering these questions is not easy because dreaming is elusive. We still do not know when it happens during the night, how long it lasts, whether we can recall its entire content, or how to control it. For more than a century, such a limited understanding of dreaming has seriously hampered experimental investigations. Nonetheless, scientific research has managed to produce considerable information about the phenomenology and physiology of dreaming and has improved our understanding of this fascinating phenomenon.

Dreaming and experimental psychology

Dreaming was first investigated on an experimental level in the nineteenth century. Calkins (1893) published the first statistical results about dreaming and argued that some aspects of dream content could be quantified. Later, questionnaires and automatic analysis of the lexical content of dream reports allowed psychologists to show that dream content has some precise phenomenological characteristics.

psychological studies

According to psychological studies (Hall and Van de Castle, 1966; Schwartz, 1999), visual imagery occurs more frequently in dreams than imagery of other senses (audition, olfaction, touch, and taste); the dream drama is mostly lived by the dreamer from a first-person perspective; some elements of real-life events previously experienced by the dreamer often contribute to the scene of the dream; most often, the dream sequence is not within the dreamer’s voluntary control (i.e., the dreamer may be convinced during the dream that the dream’s story is really happening); temporal and spatial incoherencies can occur in the dream story; the dream report is often full of people interacting with each other (e.g., discussions, fights, pursuit, sexuality); and finally, the dream report often contains strong emotions.

THANK YOU

(AND SWEET DREAMS)