Deep Sleep And Dream Sleep example essay topic

How many people really do dream? Everyone dreams, whether the dream is remembered or not. Throughout the night, there are many stages of sleep that everyone goes through. These stages include light sleep, deep sleep, and dream sleep. Nightmares are also considered dreams, just caused by different emotions. Scientists also have many electrical appliances and have done many tests to study dreams.

Dreams are very complex things. Scientists have a hard time trying to understand why people dream. Although recently, neurosurgery's precise methods of research and invention of sophisticated electrical appliances, have enabled the scientists to increase their knowledge of the human brain, nervous systems, and the body's biochemistry (Strachey 20). The invention of the electroencephalograph, otherwise known as an EEG, has made it possible for a trained operator to read the brain's reactions during wakefulness, rest, and sleep (Schneider). The machine detects and enormously amplifies the very faint electrical impulses produced by the brain; placing electrodes against subjects scalp (Freud). "Professor Nathaniel Kleitman of Chicago university, discovered that babies have a sleep rhythm of fifty to sixty minutes after which they are inclined to wake up, although obviously they can't always" (Freud).

As children grow, the body begins to develop the ninety-minute cycle associated with adult sleepers. The pattern of sleep is acquired and controlled by environmental and social conditioning. However, as people grow older the body tends to revert to the nap time habits of babyhood (Freud). Yet, though people more or less choose when to sleep, the basic ninety-minute rhythm remains. It is biological and not controlled by consciousness, rather as a healthy person's metabolism functions autonomously (Parker 93). "Eugene Aserinsky noticed that after an infant fell asleep it's eyes moved beneath the closed lids.

Also, at intervals during sleep and was the first movement when the baby began to wake" (Freud). Kleitman and Aserinsky decided to investigate whether such a pattern could be found in adult sleepers as well (Freud). By attaching extra electrodes from the EEG machine to areas around volunteer sleeper's eyes, the two scientists were able to monitor brain impulses and movements, while measuring respiration and body movements (Freud). The scientists concluded that there were two types of eye movement. Slow as found in babies and very fast movements, this could last from a few minutes to over a half an hour (Freud). These rapid eye movements, which are commonly known as REMs appeared to occur at intervals throughout the night (Beare).

The EEG tracings showed a definite alteration in brain impulses just before a sleeper began producing their REMs and at the same time there was an increase in impulse and respiration rates (Strachey 24). By waking the sleepers in an REM phase, Kleitman and Aserinsky discovered that Rams were associated with dreaming (Freud). This inference was supported by the fact that people woken during a period without REMs had no dreams to report (Fenwick 34). "Eyes apparently move behind a dreamer's eyes because of what him or her could "see" in a dream" (Shulman 73). Tests carried out on people who claimed never to dream showed that REMs were still produced which proved, as always, that everyone dreams-although the dreams may not all possess good memories (Fenwick 31). From then on investigators had no need to rely on a subject's recollection of whether or not dreams occurred (Parker 94).

The EEG tracings and REMs were a more reliable guide, Parker also stated (Parker 94). An associate of Professor Kleitman's, Dr. Dement, found that the EEG showed four types of sleep ranging from light to deep (Freud). At the beginning of rest people sink into the deepest, sleep. After eighty to ninety minutes, the dreamer will rise to the lightest kind and at the same time, the REMs will begin (Fenwick 33).

Then the process is repeated until the sleeper wakes up. During the REMs and light sleep phase, breathing is much more rapid, but with the heavy sleep and no REMs, respiration becomes slower (Beare). "External stimuli and the need to pass water etc., do not in fact evoke special dreams" (Shulman 74). Oddly enough, waking someone up during the so-called light sleep, when the REMs are taking place, can be more difficult than waking someone from a "deep" sleep, without REMs (Schneider).

Waking someone from a deep sleep does not create more dreams, when a dreamer awakes promptly after an REM period, the dream-if remembered, seems to have happened just before awakening (Parker 99). There are approximately three REM periods per night, and the intervals dividing them are more or less constant. The later the REMs commence the longer they will last (Fenwick 36). During those REMs the EEG shows that the brain wave patterns are very similar to when people are awake (Shulman 77). When people are dreaming, the brain acts in many ways as though one is actually awake (Beare). The images substitute the things seen and experienced in real, waking, life (Fenwick 33).

Also, some mechanism in our body prevents people from taking physical action by informing the body that these events are only in a dream (Schneider). As long as that mechanism works, people can act out fantasies safely in a cocoon of sleep. When it fails to do it's job, sleep talking and somnambulism will result (Strachey 34). Sleep walking is an attempt to do something about the dream and points to a deep problem; Strachey also points out (Strachey 35). Some people may talk about catching up on sleep, but it is catching up on dreams (Strachey 35). Tests suggest that people need to dream so much that in order to fulfill this necessity, all the basic patterns for sleep and waking can be broken by whatever the mechanism is that produces dreams (Beare).

Without dreams, people could even die. Cats, who were prevented from having any REM sleep over a long period as a part of Professor Jouvet's tests, died without any other apparent cause (Freud). Therefore, dreams are a very important part of everyday life. Everyone dreams, although not everyone remembers his or her dreams. The dreams people have at night are not usually remembered unless the dreamer happens to wake up soon after them (Fenwick 30). When a dreamer awakes naturally, it is usually from a dream.

It is the dreams people have just before awakened that are remembered most easily, although even these quickly fade unless recorded (Fenwick 30). If one has a good visual memory, he or she will probably remember the dreams more easily than someone with a poor visual memory (Fenwick 31). There are good reasons why people should forget dreams. If dreams were remembered as clearly and seemed as real as events in the everyday world, people would quickly be thrown into a state of confusion, unable to distinguish with certainty dream life with real life (Fenwick 32).

Anxiety is one of the most common dream emotions, and a nightmare is simply an anxiety-laden dream from which the dreamer awakens spontaneously, and which it is remembered, at least for a short time, vividly (Beare). There are degrees of fear in the nightmare world from mild panic to sheer terror, and these tend to mirror the degree of anxiety, which triggers them (Parker 106). In it's extreme form when a dreamer awakes from the nightmare in terror, sweating, heart pounding, pupils dilated with the dreams terrifying image still vivid in the mind, but more often anxiety shows up in dreams in a less melodramatic state (Shulman 73). For most people nightmares are no real problem. But if they occur very frequently and are very intense, they can be disruptive of sleep and may be distressing enough to drive people to their doctor for treatment (Fenwick 33). Women have been found to be more nightmare prone than men, there also seems to be a relationship between personality and the types of nightmares that may occur (Strachey 34).

Type A people, ambitious, driving achievers, are said to be more likely to report post traumatic nightmares (Fenwick 33). If one is prone to nightmares, there are a few obvious ways to protect dreamers from having nightmares-avoid horror videos and films before bed (Beare). Certain drugs for example, the beta-blockers prescribed for heart patients, may increase the frequency of nightmares (Parker 108). People with Parkinson's disease tend to have frequent nightmares and vivid dreams, probably due to the drug L-Dopa, which is used to treat the disease (Shulman 74). By far the most common and most potent triggers of nightmares are psychological factors-anxiety, mental stress, and major life events. When one is distressed, dreams become traumatic.

People dream more often of death, separation, and mutilation (Schneider). "So close is the link between life traumas and nightmares that it has even been suggested that the detailed and capias es dream diaries were quite commonly kept in the seventeenth and eighteenth night, serve as a useful tool for his tori cal research (Fenwick 34). Dreams can be helpful in integrating stressful events, but they are not helpful to someone who is dealing with stress by walling it off or keeping it out of his or her conscious awareness (Fenwick 34). It is only when the dreamers learned to stop trying to repress these memories in waking life; that they surfaced less often in the dreams. Subsequent studies of veterans of other wars have shown the same phenomena (Freud). Soldiers who have actually been in war have more nightmares than non-combat military personnel do, and their nightmares are more likely to be recurrent and to reflect actual events (Fenwick 36).

The nightmares of even the most nightmare prone civilians do not usually show the quality of the nightmares of soldiers. Most people's lives are uneventful, the nightmares are more likely to mirror emotion trauma and to be represented by fearful situations that have no basis is reality (Parker 98). Obviously if stress is causing frequent nightmares, the best solution is to reduce the stress. Learning a relaxation technique and practicing this before going to sleep may help (Freud). An alteration is to try to develop strategies for coping with the nightmare as it happens (Freud). In conclusion, dreams are very complex things.

The study of dreams is very difficult and it has taken scientist many years and much trial and error to figure out what they know. Although, scientists have tried to figure out why people dream and what dreams mean, I feel that only the dreamer will understand the complete meaning.