Warm Up

• What are the Universal Biological Clocks?

• Are you a Lark or an Owl? Why?

• Why do we sleep?

Dreams and Dreams and DreamingDreamingDefined in Webster's Dictionary as

• a "sequence of sensations, images, thoughts, etc., passing through a sleeping person's mind"

OneirologyOneirology

The scientific discipline of

dream research

The most famousThe most famousdream researcher wasdream researcher was

Freud

Two Parts of a Dream (according to Freud)

Manifest ContentManifest Content – the remembered storyline of a dream – who’s in the dream, what happens

Two Parts of a Dream

Latent ContentLatent Content –the underlying meaning of a dream

The mcmc is the representation of the lclc thus disguising the real meaning

of the dream

Dream Interpretation

This type of This type of therapy is therapy is dangerous…why??dangerous…why??

Types of DreamsDaydreams

– a level of consciousness between sleep and wakefulness.

– It occurs during our waking hours when we let our imagination carry us away

Why do we daydream?

• They can help us prepare for future events

• They can substitute for impulsive behavior

Lucid Dreams• The conscious perception of one's state

while dreaming – occurs when you realize you are dreaming – "Wait a second. This is only a dream!" – results in a much clearer ("lucid")

experience and usually enables direct control over the content of the dream

Lucid Dreams

Vanilla Sky- Lucid Dreams>

Nightmares• Dreams of particular intensity, with content

that the sleeper finds disturbing– related either to physiological causes, such as a

high fever – or to psychological ones, such as unusual trauma

or stress in the sleeper's life

Reoccurring Dreams

• Recurring dreams repeat themselves with little variation in story or theme.

Have You had one???Have You had one???

Dreams of Absent Minded Transgression (DAMT)

• Dreams where the individual dreaming absent mindedly performs an action that they have been trying to stop – withdrawal dreamswithdrawal dreams

• (a classic example is a smoker trying to quit dreams of lighting a cigarette).

• Subjects that have had DAMT dreams have reported awaking with intense feelings of guilt

Fantasy Prone Personalities

• Someone who imagines and recalls experiences with lifelike vividness and who spends considerable time fantasizing

To Satisfy our own Wishes

““Wish-fulfillment theory”Wish-fulfillment theory”

• Freud – “dreams are the key to understanding our inner conflicts”

• Dreams are our expressions of our wishes

To File away Memories

Information –processing Information –processing TheoryTheory– sorting and sifting through information to aid memory

storage or memory removal

To Develop and preserve neural pathways

Physiological function Physiological function theorytheory

• provides stimulation for our brain

To make sense of random activity in the brain

Activation-synthesis Activation-synthesis TheoryTheory

• The minds attempt to make sense of random neural activity

• This might explain why many dreams do not make sense