Dreaming and the Brain - Research Paper Example

Dreaming and the Brain School Dreaming and the Brain A dream can be defined as a succession of predominantly visual images that people experience during sleep. A dream typically consists of a series of images with numerous characters in them in addition to the dreamer. These characters interact with the dreamer. The dreamer assumes the role of a participant-observer. Despite being a hallucination, the dreamer experiences a dream just like any other phenomenon of perception. People, actions, objects, and scenes are experienced as impressed upon the senses through factors belonging to the external world. This makes the world of dreams a world of projection. Dreams provide a medium for transformation of cognition into a perceivable form. Images enable the ideas to be sensibly expressed in dreams whereas numbers, gestures, pictures, and words are other media that people use while awake to realize their own thoughts. A perceptible thought becomes communicable. Communications within a dream are different from those conducted while awake because unlike the former in which the audience is just the dreamer, audience in the latter may be millions of people. A dream privately displays thoughts and opinions of a dreamer. However, the state of dream has so subjective nature and the experience is so truly personal that it is almost impossible to scientifically analyze a dream (Franklin and Zyphur, 2005). Images visualized in a dream embody human thought process. Near the end of the 19th century, Freud introduced a dream theory that was largely availed by the clinical practitioners and also by the personality theorists to some extent in order to verify the propositions retrieved from personality’s dynamic theories. Freud’s pride in his first independent and original achievement in theorizing of psychology reflects in his reluctance to alter it like he did a number of discoveries made at that time. Arguably, the revised theory of anxiety, the far reaching ego theory, and the new theory of motivation were some of the most important propositions made by Freud in his later years. Of these, impact of the ego theory on the current psychoanalytic theorizing was the greatest. Although Freud related dreaming in general and the meaningful content of dreams in particular to the mental functioning, yet the highly subjective and complicated nature of dreams makes it very problematic to provide empirical support for his proposition (Franklin and Zyphur, 2005). Two people starting over with one image in a dream will see a different series of successive images. The difference of pattern is manifested in the difference of their thought processes, life experiences, level of maturity, and a number of other internalized factors. Dreams are also influenced by the experiences and thoughts an individual has had just before the sleep. People reflect on their daily life experiences consciously as well as subconsciously. That is why, many people have disturbing dreams in the times when they are physically and especially emotionally struggling in life. Defining dreaming as thinking which takes place during sleep and defining thinking as a process of generating ideas implies that dreaming is a conceiving process in which the viewed images are the embodiment of conceptions. The invisible conception transforms into a visible image in a dream. A dream can thus be defined as a work of art that demands no special skills, training, technical experience, or talent on the part of the dreamer. Calvin Hall’s cognitive theory provides great insight into modern dream research. As a behavioral psychologist, Hall explored dreaming’s cognitive dimensions. His work started before the unearthing of REM sleep and not much was known about the biology of dreams and sleep at that time. His cognitive theory of dreaming was based on quantitative analysis and was one of the primitive scientific theories of dream interpretation. The central concept of cognitive theory proposed by Hall is that dreams are in fact thoughts that appear as visual concepts in the private theater of the mind. Hall discarded the Freudian notion that implies that dreams are directed at covering something up. Hall wrote in The Meaning of Dreams, “The images of a dream are the concrete embodiments of the dreamer’s thoughts; these images give visual expression to that which is invisible, namely, conceptions” (Hall, 1953, p. 85 and 95). Dreams embody the structure of how an individual thinks about life. The display of dreams is valuable for study and analysis of dreams. Hall proposed that dreams reveal these main cognitive structures; conceptions of self, conceptions of the world, conceptions of others, conceptions of penalties, and conceptions of conflict. Conceptions of self include our people’s personal thoughts and opinions about the way they appear and about the roles they play in life. Conceptions about others include how people react to the needs of other people in their lives. Conceptions of the world include thoughts and opinions about whether the environment is a nurturing place or a barren wasteland. Conceptions of penalties include people’s thoughts and opinions about what is permissible and what is impermissible in the world. Conceptions of conflict include people’s struggle with resolving inner discord. Hall’s work is cited widely in dream research today, but his greatest legacy is what he developed as a partner with the psychologist Robert Van De Castle in the 1960s; the system of dream content analysis. It is a quantitative system termed as the Hall Van De Castle (HVdC) scale that assigns a score to a dream report with the help of 16 empirical scales (Hurd, 2009). These empirical scales include but are not limited to objects, mythological creatures, settings, people, sexual content, emotions, and animals. Measurement of dreams through the HVdC system has become a common practice today and has led to the establishment of a baseline for normal dreaming cognition. This innovation has surfaced as a huge milestone in the dream research. It has enabled the researchers to acquire a quantitative, statistically significant, and measurable snapshot of dreaming cognition. Sociologists and anthropologists also commonly use this scale today. There is an ongoing debate about the claim that dreams help preserve sleep. Mark Solms (2014, p. 91) made a huge contribution to the dream research by carrying out a neuropsychological research on 361 clinical patients with different kinds of brain injuries. Solms and Turnbull (2002) assert that the questionnaire administered to patients suggested that patients that did not dream had a higher probability of reporting disrupted sleep compared to others that had not lost dreaming. Solms and Turnbull (2002, p. 214) say that the study of Solms supports the sleep-protection theory of Freud at the desired levels of statistical significance. Contrary to this, the actual numbers reveal that no more than 49% of the patients with lost dreaming reported disrupted sleep in comparison to 32% patients that did not lose dreaming (Domhoff, 2004). The fact that the number of nondreamers without sleep problems is very large strongly challenges the theory that dreams preserve sleep. To conclude, dreaming is an activity of cognition. A dream pictorially displays the conceptions of the dreamer. Interpretation of a dream comprises the task of discovering the underlying conceptions, thoughts, and opinions that cause the images to emerge. Conceptions represented in a dream broadly relate to self-conceptions, conceptions of the world, conceptions of people, conceptions of penalties, and conceptions of conflicts. Conceptual systems are the antecedents of behavior. Material provided by dreams is useful for insight into the conceptual systems of the dreamer because they portray the prototypic as well as unconscious conceptions. Dreams’ tendency to preserve sleep is debatable. The discussed theories reflect extension of ego psychology to define the process of dreaming as a function of ego. References: Domhoff, G. W. (2004). Why Did Empirical Dream Researchers Reject Freud? A Critique of Historical Claims by Mark Solms. Dreaming. 14(1), 3-17. Franklin, M. S., and Zyphur, M. J. (2005). The Role of Dreams in the Evolution of the Human Mind. Evolutionary Psychology. 3, 59-78. Hall, C. S. (1953). The Meaning of Dreams. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. Hurd, R. (2009). Calvin Hall and the Cognitive Theory of Dreaming. Dream Studies Portal. Retrieved from http://dreamstudies.org/2009/12/03/calvin-hall-cognitive-theory-of-dreaming/. Solms, M. (2014). The neuropsychology of dreams: A clinico-anatomical study. Psychology Press. Solms, M., and Turnbull, O. (2002). The brain and the inner world. New York: Other Press. Read More