Dreams in Psychology - Term Paper Example

The topic of dreams in psychology cannot be discussed without mentioning one renowned personality called Sigmund Freud. As mystical and unique as it may seem, the world has been left wondering about what dreams are and what they constitute. There are a few questions to ask when it comes to understanding the ‘dream phenomenon’. Psychology has come to explain the aspect of dreams basically as a cognitive process that occurs in the mental faculty with the interplay of various processes. Interesting tales have been told about people who act in weird ways as they dream.

Psychoanalytic Perspective

While it is agreed that the brain does not completely stop functioning when one is asleep, physiologically, it slows down in its operations. Thought, speech, reactions, and responses are all generated by the brain, and dreams, therefore, are consequences of some thought processes. Freud, a great theorist from a psychoanalytic perspective, attributes and explains the brain in terms of unconscious functioning (Robins, 2005). From this school of thought, it is conceptualized that dreams are unconscious desires and it is through dreaming that they are vividly revealed. People in everyday life have goals and missions that they aim at achieving and fulfilling. These goals are, in most cases, repressed into the unconscious mind and it is only through sleep that they are organized making them reoccur.

Cognitive Perspective

Consequently, psychologists who subscribe to the cognitive viewpoint would consider dreams to be a process of mental states that sorts itself to complete a general functioning. Dreams have been theorized as cognitive processes in which memory is regulated. They are images and reflections of what constitutes one’s thoughts and memory systems. The perceptions, judgments, and opinions that we have about the world and the people in our ‘practically’ are revealed in dreams such that what we construe and how we conceive ourselves and the world can be manifested in our dreams. For example, if one has low self-esteem and low self-image about themselves, they may dream negatively portraying themselves as losers, unattractive or incapacitated. This, therefore, implies that dreams are a reflective mirror through which one can do an accurate introspection (Robins, 2005).

Other Schools of Thought

There are several other perspectives in psychology discipline that look at differently but within the ‘mental and behavior’ aspect. A humanistic psychologist would analyze dreams to be choices that people make; either to dream about what intrigues them or not. The behaviorist perspective conceptualizes dreams to be a consequence of the environment in which one is living such that the dreams one person in one area would have is totally different from those that another individual from a different area. This perspective views dreams as an environmentally-influenced phenomenon. Biopsychology/neuropsychology on the other hand considers dreams to be a response generated in order to protect oneself from threatening circumstances, for example, dreaming that one is running from danger when their neurotransmitter levels are high (Robins, 2005).

Psychology has a multidimensional outlook of viewing and accounting for dreams as human behavior. It is worth noting that a common point has not been reached in regard to what exactly are dreams and where they originate from. It is an aspect of behavior that greatly fascinates researchers and it is just better to have a multi-perspective view of it so as to have a comprehensive understanding of what dreams are.