Dream Analysis Essay

Dream Analysis Essay Dreams occur within all of us. They are our own personal movies played each night by our brains, creating mental images of our thoughts, desires, memories, etc.-- and all of us have them. Every single person on this planet dreams; we can dream in color, we can have nightmares, we can even have wild dreams that make little sense to us. But, what is dreaming exactly? There are many theories such as the Freudian theory, Activation - Synthesis, and the Cognitive perspective; however no one has reached a consensus. I personally side more with the Freudian theory -- that dreams are our inner wishes and desires that have yet to be fulfilled, or in some cases, can never be fulfilled. The Freudian Dream Theory has a lot to do with a person’s unconscious mind. According to Freud, a famous psychotherapist and psychologist, the unconscious mind is where our immoral wishes, violent motives, and repressed instincts that society has deemed as unethical are stored. At night, these wishes are fulfilled in the form of a dream. Think about it-- you can do anything in dreams. You can kill someone with no consequence, rob a bank and never get caught; the possibilities are endless and are at no cost to the dreamer. Dreams, according to this theory, can be any repressed urge that the dreamer may have. Unlike Freud’s theory, the Activation - Synthesis theory, developed by J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley in 1977, suggests that the way the brain functions is what actually causes a dream to occur. The brain at night is active, essentially doing a system reboot for the body to make repairs. During this period of “reboot”, circuits in the brain are activated. Some of these circuits trigger parts of the brain that are associated with emotions and memories-- also known as the limbic system. Because of this triggering, and because the mind is active, the mind tries to interpret this. This is how a dream occurs, according to this theory. The Cognitive Perspective, or Information Processing is basically where the brain tries to make sense of the things that happened throughout the day and replays the information while you are sleeping, which results in a dream. Alternatively, your brain could also be trying to figure out a problem, which also falls into this category Now, my position on why we dream sides mostly with the Freudian theory. I strongly believe that your dreams are inner wishes that your unconscious makes. I do, however feel that the other two theories play a role in how/why we dream. But for the most part, I think that the Freudian theory makes the most sense. For example, if you are dreaming about sailing across the Pacific ocean to get to Japan to save the world from Godzilla, that really has nothing to do with stuff that you

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Dream: Dream Theory Analysis Essay