Daydreams And Sleep Dreams example essay topic

When you lay down to bed at night, close your eyes, and loose conciseness, you fall asleep. Sleep is an everyday event, every human, every animal does it on a routine basis. There are many questions concerning sleep. This paper will try to answer three of them.

Why do we sleep, at what routine do we sleep, and what happens to us when we sleep. There are several theories as to why we sleep. Some believe it's a "time out" to recuperate, remove wastes from muscles, repair cells or recover abilities lost during the day. However wastes are removed without sleep with just a couple of minutes of rest. People who don't sleep for 48 hours don't need 16 hours to "catch up" all they need is one good nights sleep.

Some believe sleep conserves energy, once it provided safety from predators in a secluded space. However we lose consciousness which would make us vulnerable to attacks from predators. Or maybe it serves the brain because only organisms with integrated bundles of central nervous tissue sleep. There are many theories as to why we sleep but no one really seems to know. People can go several days without sleep and still perform normally. However any longer can cause irritability, hallucinations, or delusions.

In animals sleep deprivation leads to death, it may also hold true for people as well. In one case a man at age 52 started losing sleep. He fell deeper and deeper into an exhausted stumper or lethargic state, always feeling tired but unable to sleep. He eventually developed a lung infection and died.

An autopsy showed he had lost almost all of the large neurons in two areas of the thalamus. This suggests that sleep is caused and controlled by the thalamus. Most people sleep at night, so does this mean that our sleep cycle is dependent on night and day? It doesn't seem so. There are people who sleep during the day and studies have shown that people run on their own sleep cycles.

Volunteers put in isolation (they didn't know what time it was) went to sleep on the average 49 minutes later every cycle. So in about 11 or 12 days one would go to sleep in the morning. Whenever we change our clocks (daylight savings time) our bodies eventually readjust to the time rather than how light or dark it is outside. People who live in the extreme north or south have darkness for six month at a time, yet they go to bed on a regular cycle.

Sometimes after a hard day someone might go to bed early. So it does not seam that human sleep is dictated by night or day but by our own personal cycles. There are exceptions however, like when one feels tired in the morning, or awake when you go to bed, but generally we have our own unique sleep cycles. Physically when we sleep wastes are removed from our muscles, we digest food, and damaged cells are repaired.

Also our heart rate lowers, we breath slower and more deeply, and our metabolism falls. Basically when we sleep, physically we slow down, repair ourselves, and get ready for the next day. Dreaming can be divided into two main blocks, daydreams and sleep dreams. Daydreams occurs during wakefulness. Daydreams usually are about current problems or challenges, especially emotional problems like relationships. Daydreams can be about past events or to indulge in fantasies.

But generally daydreams are clear and easy to understand. Daydreams occur over a 90 minute cycle and usually when you " re alone. Daydreaming is beneficial, it can provide entertainment when bored and exercise human creativity. Sleep dreaming occurs during sleep. When most people dream they don't have any idea what is going on in the outside or conscious world. However there are some that do know what's going on consciously, called a Lucid Dream or a conscious and subconscious dream.

Dreams can be vivid or vague, they can scare or relax, and during the dream it makes sense but when recalled the dream it doesn't make sense. Some theories why we have dreams are we act out what we want in real life in a dream, or dreams are just random electrical firings in the brain, another is that the brain is sorting out the days events. Whatever dreams are for, no one knows why. There are several stages of sleep. One is no sleep or wakefulness and the five sleep stages. The five sleep stages are the ones we " re concerned with and they are: Stage 1 In this stage your brain is emitting small irregular waves, indicating low activity.

Your on the verge of sleep. Stage 2 The brain emits short, high peaking waves called sleep spindles. At this point small noises wont bother you. Stage 3 The same as two but with slow waves with very high peaks. Your breathing and heart rate slow, body temperature lowers, and muscles relax. Stage 4 Delta waves take over with very high peaks.

It will take a shaking motion to wake you and you wont be happy about it. Sleep walkers and talkers walk and talk at this point. This process takes about 90 minutes then reverses (1-2-3-4-3-2-1). After you come back to one, instead of waking you go into REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep and this is were most dreaming occurs. The amount of time in REM sleep is usually random, but after REM sleep you start the process over again. Hopefully some questions about sleep you had before reading this paper are now answered.

There still remains many questions about sleep. Since sleep is so connected with the mind, which is the biggest mystery in the universe humans know of sleep is difficult to understand. So it will be a long time before our questions will be answered.

Bibliography

Wade and Travis, Carole and Carol, Psychology, New York City, Harper Collins Publishers Inc., 1990 web.