Christians mainly shared the faith of the Hebrews, thinking that dreams had a supernatural character because the Old Testament contains frequent stories of divinely inspired dreams. The most famous of these dream stories was Jacob`s dream of a ladder stretching from earth to heaven. Many Christians preach that God can speak to people through their dreams. The famous glossary, the Somniale Danielis, written in Daniel`s name, tried to teach the Christian population to interpret their dreams. Dream frames were often used in medieval allegory to justify the narrative; The Duchess`s Book[36] and The Vision of Piers Plowman[37] are two of these dream visions. Even before them, in ancient times, the same device was used by Cicero and Lucian of Samosata. A small minority of people say they only dream in black and white. [106] [Review failure] A 2008 study by a researcher at the University of Dundee found that people who were only exposed to black and white television and film as children reported that they dreamed in black and white about 25% of cases. [107] Fritz Perls presented his theory of dreams as part of the holistic nature of Gestalt therapy. Dreams are seen as projections of parts of the self that have been ignored, rejected, or suppressed. [73] Jung argued that anyone in a dream could be considered an aspect of the dreamer, what he called the subjective approach to dreams. Perls expanded this view to say that even inanimate objects in a dream can represent aspects of the dreamer. We can therefore ask the dreamer to imagine himself being an object in the dream and to describe it in order to become aware of the characteristics of the object that correspond to the personality of the dreamer.
For some people, the sensations of the dreams of the previous night are sometimes felt spontaneously when falling asleep. However, they are usually too light and fleeting to allow for dream memories. At least 95% of all dreams are not remembered. Some brain chemicals needed to convert short-term memory into long-term memory are suppressed during REM sleep. Unless a dream is particularly vivid and you wake up during or immediately after, the content of the dream is not memorized. [126] Recording or reconstructing dreams can one day help with the memory of dreams. Using technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electromyography (EMG), the researchers were able to record basic dream images[127], dream speech activity[128], and dream motor behavior (such as walking and hand movements). [129] [130] At the end of the 19th century. In the nineteenth century, the psychotherapist Sigmund Freud developed a (now discredited) theory that the content of dreams is motivated by the unconscious fulfillment of wishes. Freud called dreams the “royal way to the unconscious.” [65] He theorized that the content of dreams reflects the unconscious of the dreamer and in particular that the content of the dream is formed by the fulfillment of unconscious wishes.
He argued that important unconscious desires are often related to memories and experiences of early childhood. Freud`s theory describes dreams as both manifest and latent content. Latent content refers to deep unconscious desires or fantasies, while manifest content is superficial and meaningless. [66] Manifest content often masks or masks latent content. [67] Eugen Tarnow suggests that dreams are ubiquitous excitements of long-term memory, even during waking life. The strangeness of dreams is due to the format of long-term memory, reminiscent of Penfield & Rasmussen`s findings that the electrical excitations of the cortex lead to dreamlike experiences. During waking life, an executive function interprets long-term memory based on reality checking. Tarnow`s theory is an overhaul of Freud`s dream theory, in which Freud`s unconscious is replaced by the long-term memory system and Freud`s “dream work” describes the structure of long-term memory.
[78] There are many other hypotheses about the function of dreams, including:[96] The representation of dreams in Renaissance and Baroque art is often associated with biblical accounts. Examples are The Dream of Joachim (1304-1306) from giotto`s cycle of frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel and Jusepe de Ribera`s Dream of Jacob (1639). Dreams and dark notions are the subject of several notable works of Romanticism, such as Goya`s etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (circa 1799) and Henry Fuseli`s painting The Nightmare (1781). Salvador Dalí`s Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944) also explores this theme through absurd juxtapositions of a naked lady, tigers jumping from a grenade and a spider-like elephant running in the background. Henri Rousseau`s last painting is The Dream. The Dream is a 1932 painting by Pablo Picasso. For this reason, Freud`s book is probably also the invention of a new literary genre: a life in dreams! Oneironaut is a term sometimes used for those who dream lucidly. In 1975, psychologist Keith Hearne successfully recorded a communication from a dreamer living a lucid dream. On the 12th. In April 1975, after agreeing to move his eyes left and right after becoming clear, the subject and the co-author of the resulting paper, Alan Worsley, successfully completed this task. [121] One of the central questions in sleep research is which part of the brain conducts the video-auditory experience of dreams. Upon waking up, most of the internal images of the mind are controlled from the front of the brain by the lateral prefrontal cortex (CSL).
Argumentation, planning and strategy are the result of the constructive imagination of the LPFC, which behaves like a puppeteer, assembling objects stored in memory into new combinations. However, during REM sleep, lpFC is inactive. [50] [51] In addition, in people with damaged PFCLs, dreams do not change at all, confirming that the PFCL does not control the dream. [52] Dream memory is extremely unreliable, although it is a skill that can be formed. Dreams can usually be recalled when a person is awake dreaming. [110] Women tend to have dream memories more often than men. [110] Hard-to-remember dreams can have relatively little impact, and factors such as highlighting, excitement, and interference play a role in dream memory. Often, a dream can be recalled when you see or hear a random trigger or stimulus.
The salience hypothesis suggests that dream content that stands out, i.e. new, intense or unusual, is easier to remember. There is ample evidence that vivid, intense or unusual dream content is recalled more frequently. [125] A dream diary can be used to support the memory of dreams, for personal or psychotherapeutic purposes. The first recorded mention of the idea was made by Zhuangzi, and it is also discussed in Hinduism, which makes extensive use of the argument in its writings. [32] It was officially introduced to Western philosophy in the 17th century by Descartes in his meditations on early philosophy. The stimulus, usually auditory, becomes part of a dream and eventually wakes up the dreamer. Zhang assumes that during REM sleep, the unconscious part of a brain is busy processing procedural memory; Meanwhile, the degree of activation in the conscious part of the brain falls to a very low level because the inputs of the sensory systems are essentially separated. This triggers the “continuous activation” mechanism to create a stream of data from the storage memories that flow through the conscious part of the brain. Zhang suggests that this pulsed brain activation is the inducer of any dream. He suggests that the dream, incorporating the associative thought system of the brain, is then maintained with the dreamer`s own thought until the next impulse to insert the memory itself.
This explains why dreams have characteristics of both continuity (in a dream) and sudden changes (between two dreams). [75] [76] A detailed explanation of how a dream is synthesized will be given in a later article. [77] When REM sleep episodes were recorded for their duration and subjects were awakened to create reports before major changes or forgetfulness of their dreams could occur, the subjects reported exactly how long they had dreamed in a REM sleep state. Some researchers have hypothesized that “time-dilation effects” only occur after reflection and don`t really occur in dreams. [48] This close correlation between REM sleep and dream experience was the basis for the first set of reports describing the nature of the dream: that it is a regular nocturnal phenomenon rather than an occasional phenomenon and that it correlates with high-frequency activity during each sleep period, which occurs at predictable intervals of about every 60 to 90 minutes in all people throughout their lives.