The Science of Dreams A dream is a display, usually visual, that occurs during the night while we sleep in order to deal with and asses the things that we have dealt with during the day. A dream is a remembered residue in the form of creatively assembled visual metaphors(Guiley). In 1900 Sigmund Freud wrote in the The Interpretation of Dreams that dreams are disguised wishes arising from ones unconscious mind. Having been suppressed by the conscious mind, the wishes sneak into the sleeping brain in the form of dreams. Due to electoencephalograph machine that recorded the rapid eye movement during sleep and research into the physical nature of dreaming, Freud's theory has been for the most part proven wrong. There is no definitive answer as to what a dream is. There is a raging debate over the neuroscientific point of view and the psychoanalytical point of view about what it is that actually causes dreams. In the next few paragraphs I will look at the proposed answers from both!
             the neuroscientific and psychoanalytical The process of dreaming starts in the brain stem and is controlled by two neurotransmitters that in affect turn the dreams on and of. The one that turns the dreams on uses acetylcholine to begin the dream, and the part that turns the dream off uses norepinephrine and serotonin to end the dream sequence.When the norepinephrine and serotonin are suppressed, the other chemical, acetylcholine allows electrical signals to the cortex. Norepinephrine and serotonin are necessary to imprint the dreams into your long term memory. This may explain why we forget the majority of our dreams. Since the two chemicals are suppressed during the dreaming process, most dreams are not stored in the long term memory of our minds. The brain stem neurons also start a sinusoidal wave known as theta rhythm the hippocampus, a brain structure that looks like a sea horse which is believed to be responsible for the storage of memory. While this hap...