What purpose
do dreams serve? Do they play an “adaptive
role" in the maintenance of our bodily or psychological health? Do they
truly express our secret desires? After decades of research and recent develop,
the question now is, do dreams serve
any purpose at all, and if so, what do they mean? Sigmund Freud believed that
dreams were full of hidden meanings. He theorized
that dreams were insights into one’s unconscious mind; they were the revelation
of past traumatic experiences and the exposure of one’s secret desires. Carl
Jung, an early follower of Freud who broke away to develop a very different
theory, claimed that the function of dreams is to compensate for those parts of
the psyche (total personality) that are underdeveloped in waking life. However
a study done by Calvin Hall's two-week dream series from students and longer
dream journals from adults of all ages, strongly suggest that dream content is
continuous with our waking thought and behavior. Some
clinical psychologists interpret dreams
to signal a repressed memory of abuse; For example, a dream consisting of water
may mean that one was sexually abused in a bathing suit.
Since the beginning of time people have
been trying to “decode” their dreams. To do so, they seek advice and information from the findings and
experiments of researchers and dream theorists, as wells as the information in “dream
meaning” books and online websites. From research of my own and taking many
psychology classes, I have learned that when REM sleep was first discovered,
many theorists and scientists believed that dreams only occurred during that
stage. However, we now know that dreams can occurs during any of the four
stages of sleep, but the most vivid dreams occur in the last stage (REM). I
have also learned that a person can have multiple dreams a night; the average
sleep cycle consists of four stages and lasts about 90-120 minutes. Therefore,
it is very common for a person to have several different dreams in one night.
My point
of view on dreams agrees with that of Freud’s. I believe that dreams are
full of hidden meanings and that they are insights into a person’s unconscious mind.
I think the meaning of each dream varies and that it is not fair to say that a
dream about water represents a suppressed memory of being sexually abused in a
bathing suit. After reading about
dreams, I would like to do some research on why people have reoccurring dreams
and how is it possible to do so. Dreaming is fascinating; it’s a unique and
creative side to every individual and is not the same in any two persons. I
wonder if future research will continue to hypothesize and prove that dreams
potentially have no meaning.
-Meghan Jirkovsky
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