Unromancing The Dream Theories In the 1300s philosophers Aserinsky and Dement studied the need for dreaming in humans. Previous studies done by sigmund Freud’s on dreaming concluded that dreams reveal something about a person's inner physiological experiences. Dreams are an expression of unconscious wishes that are unacceptable to the conscious mind. The true meaning of the majority of a person's dreams lie beneath the dreams surface, the surface meaning of a dream is called manifest content while the deeper meaning is called the latent content. Later, in the 1970s Allen Hobson and Robert McCarley discovered and published a new theory of dreaming. The new theory said that dreams are a person's attempt to interpret random electrical impulses occurring automatically in the brain during sleep.
As the brain is activated during REM sleep it generates new and original
information, then stored memories are compared with the new information to synthesize the dream content. Furthermore, Hobson and McCarley believed that REM sleep produced dreams. Method As Hobson and McCarley studied they used two metodes, one was studying previous work by others who had studied the subject before and the second method was rechearch sleep and dreaming patterns of animals. Results The part of the brain in the brainstem responsible for controlling physical movement and incoming information is just as active during dreaming sleep as it is when someone is awake. While someone is sleeping the sensory input that is information coming into your brain from the environment around someone and motor output that is voluntary movement of a person's body are blocked. In addition, a person is paralized in the spinal cord during sleep to protect them from acting out their dream, this could also account for the
inability to run from danger and slowness in a dream. Dreaming does not contain any ideas, emotions, stories, fears, or wishes because dreaming is simply electrical energy activated is a primitive part of the brain. Due to the randomness of the impulse images are brought from your memory to match the data generated by the brain. Once a person wakes up from REM sleep there's a change in the chemistry of the brain, many chemicals needed to produce long-term memories are restricted during REM sleep. After awakening from REM sleep you will have little to no memory of the dream
Implications and Recent Applications Later, Allen Hobson published a book called “Sleep”, His writing contradicted the previous studies he once did, saying that Dreaming could not possibly be random bursts of energy. However, the previous study still stands to better understand dreams.