Exploring the Dream World

1. Exploring the Dream World • Dreams as unconscious wishes. • Dreams as reflections of current concerns. • Dreams as a by-product of mental housekeeping. • Dreams as interpreted brain activity.

2. Dreams as Unconscious Wishes • Freud concluded that dreams provide insight into our unconscious desires (wish fullfillment). (Psychodynamic Theory) • Manifest content includes aspects of the dream we consciously experience and latent content includes unconscious wishes and thoughts symbolized in the dream. • To understand a dream we must distinguish manifest content from latent content. • Not everything in a dream is symbolic • “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”

3. Dreams as Reflections of Current Concerns (Problem-Focused) • Dreams may reflect ongoing conscious issues such as concerns over relationships, work, sex or health. • Dreams are more likely to contain material related to a person’s current concerns than chance would predict. • Example: college students and testing • Males and females appear to dream about similar issues now that lives and concerns of two sexes have become more similar.

4. Dreams as By-product of Mental Housekeeping • Unnecessary neural connections in the brain are eliminated and important ones are strengthened. • The brain divides new information into “wanted” and “unwanted.” • What we recall as dreams are only brief snippets from scanning and sorting that occurs during REM sleep.

5. Dreams as Interpreted Brain Activity • Activation-synthesis theory. • Dreaming results from the cortical synthesis and interpretation of neural signals triggered by activity in the lower part of the brain. • At same time, brain regions that handle logical thought and sensation from the external world shut down.