Why Do We Dream example essay topic

Why do we Dream? It has been said by researchers that everyone dreams during sleep and it is thought to be a universal psychical feature of our human lives. However, many of us are unable to recall vividly what happens throughout our dreams, if anything at all. Due to this clouded unique nature that is dreaming, most of the knowledge why we dream is largely inconclusive. Nonetheless, after many years of theoretical debate on the subject, three arguments have remained prominent of which I will I will be discussing. Perhaps the most renowned theory of dreaming comes from the famous psychologist, Dr Sigmund Freud.

He proposed that our dreams were likened to a 'royal road' (Plotnik 2005) to our unconscious thoughts and desires. In this uninhibited environment, Freud claimed that our secret inner thoughts were displayed in the form of symbols that represented our hidden 'desires, needs, defences, fears, and emotions' (Plotnik 2005). Freud believed we could confront these wants without the anxiety or embarrassment that the conscious world would provoke, due to the protective censors of dreaming, allowing us to be undisturbed when sleeping. Similarly it's been found that this theory of instinctive behaviour is a form of 'searching self-analysis' (Sharpe 1937) in which people can through unravelling unconscious taboos in the real world, experience them freely in their dreams. Freud associated much of our dreamt desires to be ones of a sexual nature in which we " re able to 'represent the most primitive ideas and interests imaginable' (Freud 1916). Such unacceptable and unpleasant wishes contained in dreams may explain why they are so regularly and so easily forgotten.

Freud reasoned they were deliberately repressed and somehow blacklisted from our thoughts lost deep into the unconscious never to be found upon waking. Perhaps most importantly, Freud discovered that dreams could be interpreted and applied to present day life. Psychoanalysts as we now know them conduct such interpretation and have for many people been able to derive meaning from their dreams, providing them with therapeutic results. Many have creditably theorise d that dreams are extensions of our waking life. It is believed that this close link between our daily lives and that of our dreams acts as a restorative function deeply analyzing our current 'thoughts, fears, concerns, problems and emotions. Researchers have also discovered that our dreaming can exhibit various other tasks including problem solving and the enlightening of creativity.

Such occurrences have been proven with musician Paul McCartney having written the famous dream inspired hit 'yesterday'. He recalls 'I just woke up one morning and I supposed I'd been dreaming or something and I'd got this little tune in my head' (web). Dreaming can also be viewed in a more biological sense known as the activation-synthesis theory, in which areas of our brain that are usually inactive while awake, are activated when asleep. The areas stimulated have been found, due to Hobson's brain scans or the 1970's, to be that of visual (visual cortex) and emotional (limbic system) areas of our brain. Such theory explains the random, hallucinatory images induced by dreamers and the disorder of events remembered due to the inaction of thought processing areas (prefrontal cortex). In all, dreaming is a phenomenon that can generally be argued as serviceable to our being and is certainly fascinating, however it's clear purposes remain uncertain.

Bibliography

Texts- Freud, S, The Complete Psychological Works Of Sigmund Freud, Hogarth Press, London, 1916-17.
Plotnik, R, Introduction to Psychology, Wadsworth, USA, 2005.
Sharpe, E, Dream Analysis, Hogarth Press, London, 1937.
Internet - Paul McCartney, 'On Writing Yesterday', at web accessed 3 April 2005.