Sleep and Dreams - Assignment Example

Light, noise, etc constitute external stimuli, while our fears, desires, emotions, activities of the day are the internal stimuli and Freud’s field of study. Dreams can be further divided according to their content as manifest and latent. Manifest content refers to all that a person remembers the moment he wakes up and can be recounted to anyone at all, while the latent dream is the one where a person's forbidden wishes and desires are visualized and they hold the key to unlocking the real meaning of the dream.

A person’s dreams may even be a repressed childhood wish while they may sometimes arise out of predetermined biological reasons. Dreams occur when a mind is in a phase called "ego collapse" when the Id and Superego come together on a person’s Ego. A person’s unfulfilled desires during the course of the day become a vision when the mind is stimulated, allowing for desire fulfillment in the sleep state. In 1977, J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley proposed the “activation-synthesis model of dreaming” and according to their theory, the brain circuits become activated during REM sleep.

This causes the limbic system that is the seat of memories, emotions, and sensations, in addition to the Hippocampus and the amygdala to become highly active. In return, the brain tries to synthesize and interpret this internal activity by finding the meaning of these signals which results in dreams. This model suggests that dreams are a subjective interpretation of signals generated by the brain during sleep. Hobson, J.A. (1995).