Understanding Sleep: Biological Rhythms, Functions, and Dream Theories

the topic of this lecture is sleep and why we sleep so let's start by talking about what

sleep is so sleep is a state marked by relatively low physical activity so we're not doing a lot of movement while

we're sleeping then we toss and turn sometimes and we adjust our bodily position those sorts of things

but we're not usually moving around a great deal sleep also has a reduced sense of awareness of the world around

us but it's not like we're completely and utterly oblivious to what's going on again we have some level of awareness of

the external environment that's what allows us to do things like in the morning we can hear our alarm going off

next to our bed right but sleep is going to be the state of being in which we spend you know if you think about it we

spend almost a third of Our Lives asleep and there's still a lot that we don't understand about sleepa as we'll talk

about in this lecture so the sleep wake cycle seems to be controlled by multiple brain areas

including the thalamus and hypothalamus which are responsible or at least they're implicated in slow wave sleep

and the pons which is implicated in REM sleep REM sleep sleep is associated with the secretion

and regulation of a variety of hormones including melatonin which is going to be a very popular

medication that's used for for helping sleep so for example people have a lot of sleep issues for example I I have a

lot of sleep trouble I I suffer from insomnia so I frequently use melatonin to try to to help improve my Sleep

Quality it's not a great thing to do if you can get away without using it but it's something that we can use because

melatonin is is going to be deeply connected with our ability to sleep follicle stimulating hormone is also

going to be secreted regulated during sleep luteinizing hormone and growth hormone right

so next up will be our biological rhythms and and our sleep our level of awareness tends to vary over the course

of the day so for example some people are mourning people when they wake up in the morning

they're very bright and alert and they're kind of highest level of awarenesses during the morning hours

other people are more kind of afternoon folks so maybe in the morning you know they're kind of groggy after getting up

but by the time we get around to the afternoon then they're kind their level awareness is at its highest so people's

biological rhythms are going to differ what we're going to be interested in is going to be this idea of circadian

rhythms circadian rhythms are 24-hour biological Cycles this is going to regulate a number of bodily functions

our sleep is on a 24-hour circadian rhythm other things like our blood pressure urine production hormonal

secretions body temperature all of those things are on that they are regulated by circadian rhythms

now without any sort of light cue our by our circadian rhythm tends to be a bit longer than 24 hours so for many of us

it's around 24.2 24.3 hours what happens is that light resets our biological clock it resets our circadian

rhythms each morning so when light starts coming through your your bedroom window for example if you

have curtains up you're still likely going unless you have like full blackout curtains you're still going to see light

kind of creeping in around the curtains those sorts of things reset our biological clock each morning the way in

which researchers found that the human biological Rhythm can be a bit longer than 24 hours is by taking research

participants and uh preventing them from seeing any sort of time related cue so basic basically keeping them in rooms

for days on end without any sort of Windows where the lights were on a constant cycle where they didn't have

access to any sort of clock so they couldn't see what time it was and what researchers did is they basically

tracked to see when do these people actually start going to sleep when when do they think it's night and what they

found is that our biological rhythms tend to be a little bit longer than 24 hours about 24.2 hours when left to our

own devices without any sort of external stimulation whether that external stimulation is looking at a clock if

it's uh light which is going to be the most natural type of external stimulation that kind of resets our

biological rhythms each day circadian rhythms although those are going to be the ones we're going to

focus on primarily they're not the only biological rhythms they're also rhythms called ultrabian rhythms which are going

to be shorter than 24 hours so for example for humans we have all tradian feeding rhythms so basically we start to

get hungry uh multiple times per day right now part of this is determined by your culture so culture will kind of

tell you when when meal times are right you kind of get this sense of when you should be getting hungry and those can

be affected to some extent by culture but all cultures are feeding multiple times per day

they're also in Freudian rhythms which are going to be longer than 24 hours so for example in in human females the

menstrual cycle is about 28 days in length right so this is an example of an infradian Rhythm rhythms that are longer

than 24 hours okay so let's focus on this idea of circadian rhythms and let's talk about

one particular biological function that that falls under the role of the Circadian rhythm and that's body

temperature so what this chart is showing us is how body temperature changes in typical

individuals over the course of a day so this particular uh chart is based off of eight young men but it's similar for

people of of other ages and for women as well and so we all know that 98.6 degrees is the kind of typical body

temperature for humans but our body temperatures don't stay perfectly at 98.6 even if we are we're not sick and

don't have a fever or anything of that so rather they our body temperatures change over the course of a typical day

so for example we'll see we'll kind of start here a little before midnight and see that the this the average body

temperature for the these eight young men was a little above 98.6 as the night goes on as we start getting one two

three four a.m body temperature is now dropping so getting close to 97.5 as we start getting closer to waking it's

starting to come up again by the time we're around noon right we're now back up a little above 98.6 right this is

then kind of peaking around 10 p.m or so before it begins dropping off the next night right this is the sort of pattern

that we see that's very typical for individuals in terms of body temperature where while we're asleep our body

temperature tends to be at its lowest that's why one common piece of advice for individuals that are having trouble

with their Sleep Quality is to make their apartment or house or bedroom at least a little bit cooler to help reduce

the body temperature one of the mistakes that sometimes people make is they want to be warm while they think that they

want to be warm while they sleep and you actually want to be a little bit on the cooler side of things to reduce help

your body temperature stay relatively low to improve Sleep Quality during sleep

the biological mechanism that's implicated in our circadian rhythms is going to be the scn the suprachiasmatic

nucleus which is located in the hypothalamus this is essentially going to serve as kind of our brain's clock

mechanism if you will this biological clock is going to reset itself each day with light cues right so

it's going to be very responsive to light right so basically in the morning when light starts coming in through our

bedroom window right we can detect that right when we wake up and we look outside in the morning we see bright

sunlight right basically that's starting to reset our biological rhythms right so the light is hitting the retina the

retina then is sending that information back here to the hypothalamus the scn is then kind of restarting our clock for

the day right we'll talk more about uh the way in which this works a little bit later

so one of the important things about circadian rhythms is that they can get they can get out of sync with the

environment around us now again as we were talking about whenever the day starts right we can start to reset our

biological rhythms by exposing ourselves to Bright Light seeing the the light of the Sun in the morning is a great way to

kind of reset our biological clock however if we travel right if we travel really far for example by by jet one of

the things that's going to happen is that we can get our biological rhythms really out of sync with the world around

us so for example if you travel North and South you typically aren't going to

experience jet lag because there isn't any change in time zone for the most part

however if you start traveling East and West right because of the rotation of the earth and the way our time zones are

located what you'll start seeing are differences in the time of day right so your biological rhythms right

what time your body thinks it is starts to get out of sync with the time of the in the world around you so for example

if you if you look up here it's easier for us to adjust if we travel to the West right so for example if if you're

leaving Michigan right and you go to California right it's a bit easier for you to make that sort of adjustment

right you're moving across multiple time zones right which is going to throw your body out of sync with the world around

you however right the nature of that sort of change is going to be such that it's

going to be a little bit easier for you to adjust to jet lag right because what what you can do is you can simply stay

up a bit longer right so for example if we're jumping across four time zones when you think it's 10 p.m right the

world around you is telling it telling you that it's only really 6 PM right because you've jumped across multiple

time zones with this sort of Westward travel right the easy solution is well okay you just

stay up a bit later that day right so even though it feels really really late to you right you stay up and you go to

bed at a relatively normal time like let's say you go to bed at 11 o'clock that night based off of the world around

you right it may feel like you're going to bed at like 3 A.M right because it's your body is saying wow I've been up for

a long time but the next day it's going to be very likely that you can simply uh hopefully you'll sleep well that night

you'll get a decent night's sleep and the next day it's going to be likely that you'll start to adjust more quickly

right to this change in time zones what makes it a bit harder to adjust is if you're flying from California to the

east coast right if you're jumping across four time zones going east it's more difficult for us to adjust because

what's happening is it's now getting uh it's now the the time of day right actually feels a bit earlier right than

it really is and this is difficult for our bodies to adjust to because for example when it's

11 o'clock at night and it's time for you to go to bed theoretically right your body may be

feeling like it's it's three or four hours earlier depending on how many time zones you've traversed right and so it

may be much more difficult for us to go to sleep earlier right so for many of us it's easier for us to travel West

because we can stay awake for a little bit longer and more quickly kind of get into sync with the world around us it's

harder for us to travel east right jet lag tends to be much worse right if we travel east because it's harder for us

to go to bed at a time of day that's much earlier than we normally would right it's easier for us to stay up a

little bit longer and kind of get in the sink it's harder for us to go to bed earlier and so what would happen is for

this person who's traveled from California to New York is they may have difficulty going to sleep that night so

instead of they maybe they go to bed at 11 o'clock but they don't actually manage to get to sleep until three or

four in the morning which is when their body would normally be expecting to go to sleep and then by the time morning

comes they've only gotten three four hours of sleep and so they may be tired for a much longer period of time

one of the other things that can really interfere with our quality of sleep is rotating shift work right and the reason

for this is similar to jet lag it's interfering with when we would normally go to sleep right so rotating shift work

which isn't common people working in hospitals so nurses for example often have to work on these kind of rotating

shifts firefighters may also have to to work on rotating shifts as well because in these professions they we need people

on duty at all hours of day and night and a lot of times nurses don't necessarily want to always be on the

night shift so what happens with these kind of rotating shifts is maybe no one has to be on the night shift all the

time but everybody kind of has to take their turn periodically working on the night shift

there are a variety of strategies for kind of realigning our biological rhythms when they get out of sync with

the world around us I mentioned melatonin previously this is a hormone produced by the pineal gland that's

involved in our circadian rhythms and so it's not uncommon for people if they're traveling to take melatonin to help

their bodies adjust to the change and basically if you take melatonin in about 90 minutes or so before you go to sleep

it can help induce sleep and so people can realign their biological rhythms a bit more quickly by using drugs like

melatonin um you can also use exposure to Bright Lights in the morning to help kind of

reset your biological clock more quickly if you're traveling for example or if you're in some sort of occupation that

has rotating shift work a bright light therapy early in the morning can also be quite helpful for you

if you uh let's say for example you're in charge of some sort of rotating shift work so if you are the person in charge

of Designing shifts for firefighters for example one of the things that has been found to be very very helpful is to have

progressively later starting times for shift work so let's say for example we have a relatively simple schedule where

people work on one shift for one week then the next week they work on a different shift in the next week on a

different shift so we have a three shift three week shift cycle if we're going to do that what we would want is to have

progressively later starting times for shift work so if we start off with our day shift right having those people work

day shift for one week the second week what we'd want to do is we want to shift them over to the evening shift right so

that their starting time is getting later right they go from starting at 8 A.M to 4 P.M for example then the

following week they would move to the night shift so now they start working at midnight for people then the next week

they start back over with the day shift evening shift night shift right that works much better than kind of going

with progressively earlier starting times so for example if you're working the day shift this week what we don't

want to do is move you to the night shift the following week because that's essentially kind of moving it so that

your start time is actually kind of earlier rather than later right so moving in this later Progressive

Progressive cycle helps people adjust to their sleep now rotating shift work is almost never

great for Sleep Quality people who do rotating shift work almost invariably uh have some sort of

issue with their sleep either they're not getting enough sleep or they have to sleep a lot more than normal to feel

well rested right so rotating shift work in the perfect world is is not is not great for our Sleep Quality for most of

us one of the questions that we want to consider is why we sleep right so as we

mentioned previously we spend almost a third of our lives right so roughly about seven to eight hours a day right

sleeping at least hopefully people are getting an adequate amount of sleep so one of the questions is why do we

actually sleep and let me cut to the Chase and the answer is we still don't really know but here are some different

hypotheses for why we may sleep one possibility is that sleep may have evolved to help us conserve energy right

so we burn fewer calories while we're asleep and the idea is that throughout much of human history right we haven't

had plentiful access to food and so during the darkest times of day humans are not very well equipped to

kind of travel around our environment in the dark we don't see very well at nines our other senses aren't nearly as acute

as some other organisms so we are at a tremendous disadvantage during night during the night and so one possibility

as we evolve to sleep in order to conserve energy so we're essentially kind of saving up our bodily energy

during a time of day when we wouldn't be terribly productive anyway we wouldn't be great at hunting or gathering for

example at night because we we simply don't our senses aren't acute enough to allow us to be terribly effective so

that's one possibility another possibility is that immobilization during sleep may be

adaptive because it reduces the dangers that we may expose ourselves to so for example prey animals sleep at night to

decrease to decrease their risk of attracting Predators right and the same thing might actually apply to us right

we're not again as we were talking about previously our senses aren't terribly well adapted for dealing with the night

so for example and when I'm talking about the night I'm not talking about the night time in a city where you have

a lot of street lights and ambient light we can still see fairly well right that's not what the dark really has been

throughout most of human history right our current modern experience of the dark in cities and neighborhoods is very

different than what has been throughout most of human history when there weren't ambient light sources kind of making the

darkness a little easier for us to navigate throughout most of human history right the Knight right has

basically been what you would see out in the middle of the country right in the middle of the night pitch black or at

least very little like you coming from the moon and stars right so for most of human history it's been very very dark

right during the course of the night we haven't had street lights and Street lamps and those sorts of things these

ambient light cues that allow us to see a little bit better in the dark so the idea is that our sleep may have

immobilized US during a time of day when we would have been in danger from things like uh predatory animals also simply

injuring ourselves if you've ever tried to walk through the woods at night without some sort of light cue it's

really dangerous it's very easy to trip over something and hurt ourselves and so sleep may have evolved according to this

Theory to help immobilize US during a time of day when we just wouldn't have been terribly functional anyway

another possibility is that sleep may help animals including ourselves to restore energy and otherly bodily

resources so this idea basically posits that during sleep we tend to replenish a lot of our chemicals so for example

neurotransmitters tend to be replenished during this time we're also repairing cellular damage so healing tends to be

ramped up a little bit during periods of sleep growth and bodily repair tend to occur during the deepest stages of sleep

and there's been research showing that disrupted sleep patterns may actually delay growth in bodily repair

now these are three possibilities there's some evidence for all of them but there's also some of these are

pretty speculative like for example the idea that sleep may have evolved to conserve energy it makes some sense but

there isn't a lot of direct support for this idea what we do know is that for humans we

have sleep needs that change at different ages so for example newborn children let's say between birth and

about three months their recommended amount of sleep is they should be getting about 14 to 17 hours of sleep

per day right so they should be sleeping a lot now uh the the periods that could be appropriate right so we can kind of

build a little bit of window a bit of a window around that so if your newborn is sleeping 11 hours a day that might very

well be okay maybe they just need a little less sleep than is typical if your newborn's sleeping up to 19 hours a

day okay that's that's a little bit more than is typical but not terribly unusual however it's not recommended that

newborns sleep less than 11 hours or more than 19 hours right we'll see this General sort of pattern kind of

unfolding where at every age range there's kind of this there's a range of what's typical and then there's kind of

a slightly wider range of okay this might be okay and then eventually we'll see that we really don't want to see

people getting far outside of these bounds so four to 11 month olds we're looking

for them typically to sleep 12 to 15 hours it's not uncommon to hear new parents

saying things like asking older relatives is there something wrong with my child because there's seem to still

be sleeping a lot and it's not unusual at all for young children to be sleeping a lot 12 to 15 hours a day during that

first year or so during the first one to two years sleeping 11 to 14 hours is not uncommon

when kids are getting to ages three to five 10 to 13 hours is still recommended kids need a lot of sleep in part this is

due to things like cognitive development that's going on also growth is taking place so we want kids to be getting a

lot of sleep during these earliest years of life from ages 6 to 13 9 to 11 hours is quite

common for 14 to 17 year olds right so teenagers they need to be getting eight to ten hours of sleep

now what typically happens for teenagers is their sleep pattern may be disrupted where it's not uncommon for teenagers to

get less than eight hours of sleep during weeknights and then try to make up for that by sleeping in really late

on weekends right this is the idea of acquiring what's referred to as a sleep debt where you're reducing the number of

hours of sleep you're getting During certain days of the week and then trying to make up for that during other days of

the week right we also see this in adults as well where maybe during the week they they trim off a little bit of

sleep so they cut off a couple hours of sleep because they have to get up early to go to work and they try to make up

for that over the weekends by sleeping in a little bit later sleep debt is not a great thing to carry

because you aren't making up for that loss sleep by sleeping a little bit later on the weekends right people trick

themselves into thinking they're making up for that lost sleep but you really don't so it's better to try to schedule

out your life so that you're getting an adequate amount of sleep each day now of course that's easier said than done but

it's something again that deserves our attention and deserves to be a priority in our lives

people who are 18 to 25 really need about seven to nine hours of sleep for the most part 26 to 64. same thing about

seven to nine and people who are 65 or older need slightly less but not much less about seven to eight right now what

we start seeing again if we're looking at these age spans is we're seeing that the amount that may be appropriate is

getting a bit wider and wider so for example when people are getting uh into uh their 60s and 70s it's not terribly

uncommon for people to get five or six hours of sleep some people sleep a lot but if anything less sleep tends to be

more common in older adulthood with earlier times of Awakening and in some cases you'll hear individuals saying

that they they get far less sleep than others like people saying they get only they only need

about four hours of sleep per night it's I'm not saying that's not true there may be very rare exceptions where

someone really only needs four hours of sleep however my guess is that if you or someone you know is saying they only

need four hours of sleep they may only be getting four hours of sleep but they may actually need a little bit more than

that one of the things we'll talk about later is that it's often difficult for individuals to really assess the the

cost of not getting enough sleep and there are certain cognitive costs there are some emotional costs but it's often

difficult for us to detect these we think that we're doing just fine getting far less sleep than we need when

actually we may not be doing as well as we think we are right we'll talk about some of those issues later

so let's shift our attention for a moment to dreams dreams are going to be mental experiences that we have during

sleep the content of our dreams is often pretty familiar and mundane so for example for college students it's not

uncommon for them to dream about taking classes or spending time with their friends and family or working at their

part-time job however we're more likely to remember our weirder drinks the dreams that are

more bizarre right so one of the things we'll talk about in a little bit is that during a normal night's sleep it's

likely that we're going to experience about four or so dreaming episodes right now you and I may not remember all those

dreaming episodes right in fact some people don't remember their dreams very often at all most nights I don't

remember my dreams some nights I do most nights I don't right and so some people are like me and just don't really

remember their dreams that doesn't mean that we don't have them in fact there's a very very high probability that you

have dreams just like everybody else you may just not be terribly sensitive to actually remembering them I tend to

remember my dreams if they're kind of weirder or if they happen to come very close to a period of Awakening um so for

example if my alarm goes off right when I'm in the middle of a dream I'm much more likely to remember that sort of

dream than if my alarm goes off during a period of sleep when I'm not dreaming and we'll talk more about that later

that's a very common phenomenon of common themes and and dreams involve things like sex aggression and

Misfortune although again those certainly are not themes that are found in all Dreams they're just relatively

common ones people usually dream about themselves in their kind of everyday experiences we've

been talking about the idea that Freud had is that a lot of our dreams are really kind of involving this Waking

Life spillover this daily residue if you will so oftentimes the kind of framework or story of our dreams have to do with

the kind of things you and I are doing every day commuting to work taking classes studying for classes those sorts

of things depending on where you are in your life one of the interesting things is that

thoughts that we're actively trying to suppress are actually slightly more likely to be the focus of our dreams

this is one of the insights that Freud had and there's some there's been some support for this now the sport isn't

perfect but there's at least a little bit of support for this so for example um if someone is on a diet right and

they're working hard not to think much about high fat high calorie foods so let's say for example you have a

roommate even though you're on a diet and trying to cut down your your food intake a little bit your roommate is not

on a diet right they have this piece of chocolate cake on the kitchen counter and you're trying hard not to think

about it not to look at it not to be obsessed with it it's possible that that chocolate cake right could be a theme in

tonight's dream right because you've been working hard on not thinking about it during the day suppressed thoughts

kind of work like a spring right if you push a thought down right kind of like if you push a spring down right when you

let off of the spring it pops back up the same sort of idea is believed to take place with suppressed thoughts

right if we work hard to suppress a thought then when we kind of let off those sorts of guards right those sorts

of safeguards that are pushing it down like what happens when we're asleep right we're kind of relaxing our guards

the idea is that those thoughts May pop up to the surface with with a particular Force if you will

so as we've talked about previously people will sometimes incorporate external stimuli into their dreams so

your alarm clock going off in the morning may become a a fire siren or something of that or a siren from a fire

truck or something of that sort right so we take some sort of loud uh obnoxious sort of stimulus and we changed into

another kind of loud obnoxious stimulus that makes sense with the rest of the content of our dream

there are a number of theories about dreaming um now even though there are a number of

theories about this one of the things we'll talk about is that some of these theories will have a bit more support

than than others as well as we'll get to and so uh ideas about why we dream and what meaning if any dreams have are

going to differ across cultures and periods of time um Sigmund Freud uh had a very popular

way of thinking about dreams that has a lot to do with how people frequently interpret their dreams today

so he thought that dreams were a way of gaining access to un the unconscious mind

and what he thought is that dreams have two kind of layers two types of content the first is what he referred to as the

Manifest content this is going to be the actual content of the dream right the characters in The Dream the setting of

The Dream right the plot of the dream right so for example um let's say that uh let's say that you

are a young woman and you have a dream tonight about being chased uh let's say that you're in your dream you're on a on

a train going through a tunnel and on this train are a bunch of snakes that are chasing you through this train right

so the Manifest content would be the characters and the dream so you're in the dream maybe there are other

passengers on the train right the setting of the dream so you're on this train that's going through a tunnel and

then there's a there's the actual kind of plot right the plot is that you're being chased by these snakes that are

chasing you through this uh through this uh train the latent content According to Freud is

going to be the hidden meaning of the dream right this is what this is where he thought the unconscious right can be

glimpsed is by interpreting the latent content of our dreams right so destroyed right the idea is that he would look at

the sort of ideas that are that are captured by our dreams uh Freud uh tended to have a lot of sexual imagery

or at least he saw a lot of sexual imagery and dreams a lot of aggressive content as well and so for Freud one of

the common things that he would often interpret in dreams are phallic symbols right symbols that represent a a human

penis and so for Freud any sort of elongated object was essentially a valid symbol right so for Freud a train would

be a phallic symbol right for Freud a snake would be a phallic symbol right perforated cigar is a phallics of right

anything that's elongated in nature is a phallic symbol right for Freud also anything that holds something else like

a cup for example would be a symbol of a vagina right so for Freud when he was thinking about the content of that young

woman's dream where she's being where she's on a train going through a tunnel right being chased by snakes right he

would probably interpret a lot of uh sexual content right sexual anxiety right would be his most likely

interpretation of that particular dream right based on the latent content right the Manifest content didn't have

anything about sex right it's a woman on a train being chased by snakes right no sexual content at all at the Manifest

level right at the latent level Freud would interpret a lot of phallic imagery right the train would be a phallic image

the snakes would be a phallic image the fact that the snakes are chasing the woman would suggest that maybe there's

some sort of sexual anxiety potentially Carl Jung who was a contemporary of Freud and built on and changed some of

Freud's ideas so we'll talk about him as being a Neo Freudian later in the semester uh Carl Jung believed that what

dreams allow us to do is it's happened to something he referred to as the collective unconscious

the collective unconscious is this theoretical sort of idea that there isn't any uh empirical support for but

it's an interesting idea it's just there's there's no there's no clear empirical support for this whatsoever

um but what Jung thought is that there's this Collective unconscious which is this repository of information that's

shared by all people across cultures and he thought that it's kind of like this kind of shared inherited memory that we

have if you will and you thought that when we're asleep we can kind of access this Collective unconscious

um Jung thought that certain symbols and dreams may reflect certain Universal archetypes so for example he thought

that circles referred to as mandalas these kind of magical circles were recurring uh symbol that show up in

culture after culture and he thought the reason why these things tend to show up in culture after culture and oftentimes

in our dreams is because they're part of our Collective unconscious what research has shown is that dreams

may represent life events that are important to the treatment so for example if you have a if you have an

important exam tomorrow it wouldn't be uncommon for your dreams tonight to have something to do with adding with that

exam that you're anticipating tomorrow right if you're feeling anxious about some sort of upcoming event it's not

uncommon for our dreams to reflect those sorts of current anxieties and insecurities and those sorts of things

dreaming is also thought to represent a state of what's referred to as proto-consciousness right kind of a way

for us to kind of simulate reality um that helps us during conscious periods so for example the one

possibility for dreaming is that it may be a way for us to kind of play out and simulate reality and try to figure out

ways to navigate uh conflict or difficult situations we may encounter let's say for example that uh that

you're a young man and you've been dating this young woman for a for a couple of months and things seem to be

going okay but things aren't perfect and you get a text from her tonight saying that she wants to she wants to schedule

a time for the two of you to to talk tomorrow right so if you think that maybe you're a little more interested in

continuing this relationship than she is right while you're waiting on having that conversation tomorrow to figure out

what she wants to talk about right you may in your dreams tonight you may kind of play out different scenarios about

that sort of conversation right is there something that you can say or some sort of gesture that you can make that may

cause her to decide to give you more of an opportunity right if you're anticipating that this is going to be a

chance for her to kind of break off the relationship right and so the idea is that during our

dreaming States it may allow us to kind of simulate different possibilities and modify and give ourselves strategies for

dealing with difficult situations right right now again there isn't a great deal of support for that idea but it's an

interesting speculation one other thing I want to mention uh really quickly here is the idea of lucid

dreams um lucid dreams occur when certain aspects of wakefulness are maintained

during a dreaming state so for example a person may become aware that they are dreaming and the idea is that if you're

aware of your experiencing a lucid dream you can actually alter your behavior in the dream to correspond with what you

would like to do um some people will report being able to experience lucid dreaming fairly often

there are strategies that people can use to try to increase the probability of experiencing a lucid dream I can't say

I've ever experienced a lucid dream right there have been some dreams that have seemed very vibrant and real to me

but I can't say I've ever been really aware of the fact that I was dreaming during a dreaming state

we also want to talk about some of the most popular kind of models of dreaming so as we've already alluded to Freud's

ideas are are still popular um there just isn't a lot of uh empirical support for these sorts of

ideas fully thought that our dreams were essentially a form of wish fulfillment the daily residue shapes kind of the

content of dreams but the idea is they're trying to satisfy some sort of unconscious need right so for example if

you uh if you have a dream tonight um about uh having an affair with your neighbor for example right it's possible

According to Freud that this will be picking up on some sort of unconscious desire that you may have right for

example maybe you find the neighbor to be very attractive right and so the idea is from Freud's perspective this is a

type of unconscious wish fulfillment another theory of dreaming is the problem-solving view which we kind of

alluded to earlier with the idea of these kind of proto-consciousness the idea behind this problem-solving view is

that we may uh think through different major problems in our lives and our dreams right and kind of uh kind of

simulate different outcomes about what do we think would happen if we did this what do we think would happen if we did

that right and so what we can do is we can engage we can use our dreams as a way to kind of solve problems in our

actual daily lives again not a tremendous amount of support for that approach either

rather I I think the approach that that is probably the most reasonable is going to be the one that is in some cases the

most disappointing to folks which is the activation synthesis model the idea behind activation synthesis is

that our dreams aren't really they don't really have a lot of inherent meaning rather what happens is that while we're

asleep and While We're Dreaming different brain areas are going to be active during the sleep and dreaming

process what happens is different areas of the brain are active are activated during

our dreaming what happens is we have these kind of random sorts of images and stories and characters that are

happening and our brain is really about finding order in chaos right finding pattern and

chaos and so what happens according to the activation synthesis model is we have all these different sorts of areas

of our brain being stimulated we're seeing different things we're hearing different things maybe we're smelling

things in our dreams and what's happening is that our brain is trying to weave these things together

into something that resembles a relatively coherent story now what's important about this is this

captures some of the really kind of problematic aspects of dreams that the other theories of Dreams really uh don't

uh don't pay a great deal of attention to for example when we dream if you try to

explain if you try to tell your roommate about your dream the next morning right so let's say you have some vivid dream

tonight tomorrow morning over breakfast you're trying to tell your roommate about it one of the things that you may

recognize is you as you start to recount your dream to your roommate is it your dream may not make a great deal of sense

right the characters May kind of change as though as as scenes kind of unfold the setting may change right so in the

dream maybe at one moment you're in one place the next moment you're somewhere else doing something else that's still

related to the original kind of plot but it's it's different the settings changing the characters are changing

right that sort of inconsistency is often kind of glossed over by some of the other theories but makes perfect

sense in the context of the activation synthesis model one of the other issues that that makes

sense about dreams in light of the activation synthesis model is the fact that it's usually difficult for us to

remember our dreams after Awakening so for example it I'm sure most of you have experienced things like this I I

experience this a lot when I actually remember my dreams is when I first wake up I remember having some sort of dream

that seemed pretty vivid right I'm eager to tell my wife about it right but by the time like I actually get out of bed

and find her in the kitchen or whatever I've started to forget what the dream was actually about right according to

the activation census model the reason why we have trouble remembering our dreams is because of the kind of

incoherent structure of dreams right they don't follow a nice logical progression like our normal lives do

like most stories that we read or television shows that we watch or movies that we watch are going to be following

some sort of relatively linear progression so we can follow the story right the characters aren't kind of

randomly fluctuating the scenes aren't randomly fluctuating but in dreams they typically do right and so the idea is

that may be a large part of why we have so much difficulty actually remembering our dreams