Dreams
Everyone dreams. Young, old, rich poor, American or not, dreaming is a part of the human condition. Since men became capable of thinking, they began dreaming. But when they began dreaming, they also were troubled by it. Why do I dream? What do my dreams mean? These are the questions they asked. Thousands of years before the field of psychology developed, these questions were discussed and debated. They still are. In this paper, I will look at these questions and review some of the many ways in which they have been answered over the ages. A number of theories have been developed.According to John Suler of Rider University, Babylonians saw dreams as messages from supernatural beings (good dreams came from the gods and bad ones from demons), while the Assyrians saw dreams as omens. Bad dreams demanded action to counter them, while other dreams were seen as "advice" (Suler, 1996).The ancient Egyptians tried to figure out dreams in terms of prophecy. In a papyrus dream book that dates back nearly fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, certain dream symbols are explained. If you dreamed, for example, that your teeth were falling out, it meant your relatives were plotting to kill you (Psychology Notebook: Dreams, acces
While all these cultures see dreams a very important to life, during the Renaissance, the importance of dreams was dismissed. They cited research showing dreams to be controlled by the pons - the part of the brain stem involved in automatic tasks such as breathing (Robertson, 2000). He told the ruler that his dream was a warning that seven years of famine would follow, and for this valuable warning, Joseph was made a prince of Egypt (Robertson, 2000). In 1900, Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, which changed the way we look at dreams. In the Old Testament of the ancient Hebrews, Joseph was skilled at dream interpretation and was called by Pharaoh, who had nightmares, for help. The Japanese see dreams as visions to help answer questions that are troubling the waking self. Carl Jung, who was a Swiss disciple and friend of Freud came to believe that sexuality was just one of several themes that appeared in dreams. With the use of new scanning techniques such as positron emission tomography (PET), together with functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), Allen Braun of the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders, has discovered that the regions of the brain which control emotion and motivation are highly active during rapid eye motion (REM) sleep when most dreaming occurs (Robertson, 2000). It led to and represents the view of many scientists, starting in the 1960's, who dismissed Freud, claiming that dreams are a series of baseless, irrational responses, unworthy of interpretation and analysis. " This bias against dreams lasted until the Austrian, Sigmund Freud came along in the late nineteenth century (Psychology Notebook: Dreams, accessed at library. A "lucid dream" is one in which you are aware that you are dreaming. In A Guide to Psychology and Practice, Richmond represents another strand of thought regarding dreams.
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