Dream Psychology

To help inform my work I decided to look dream psychology I started to read 'The Interpretation of Dreams' by Prof. Dr. Sigmund Freud, however I found this too complex as the terminology was too advanced.

From the brief chapter I did read I discovered that Sarah Weed and Florence Hallam discovered that 58% of dreams are 'disagreeable' and only 28.6% are 'positivity pleasant'.

I decided to try and find some more basic explanations to build up my knowledge so I went on to YouTube to see if there were any talks that might be useful and I found a few very helpful videos.

Why do we dream? by Vsauce on youtube

The scientific study of dreams is called Oneirology. This is a relativity new study but even before this was established, people have been trying to understand dreams for thousands of year.

It is a well known fact that we forgot roughly 95% of dreams 10 minuets after they happen.

We do most of our dreaming when we are in Rapid Eye Movement stage of sleep more commonly known as REM Sleep. When we are in REM sleep parts of the brain work the same when we are awake (paradoxical sleep) however norepinephrine, serotonin and histamine are blocked explaining why we can't move (our body does this so we don't act out our dreams and injure ourselves. REM Atopia or better known as sleep paralysis happens when the chemical block hasn't worn off before your brain has worn off meaning you are awake but can't move. Lucid Dreaming is when you can control what happens in your dream, there are also ways that you can try and achieve this.

The unconscious brain is trying to work out/sort out the important things from the day before sending signals out to the conscious brain which creates a dream as a way of coping. Most people believe that most dreams are an epiphenomenon meaning they don't have a purpose, they are an accidental result of an important process going on in the brain.

Some people don't believe this, they believe that dreams serve a purpose of preparing us for threats as negative dreams are more common. (anxiety is the number one reported emotion). This theory came around as in the past we didn't know what we might encounter on a day to day basis so we had to be prepared. So in our dreams if we got attacked for chased it would better prepare us for that feeling in the real world. Apparently people who had terrifying dreams were better fighters and had better genes.

Why do we dream? by Amy Adkins TED TALK

In the 3rd millennium BCE, Mesopotamian kings recorded and interpreted their dreams on wax tablets. 1000 years later ancient Egyptians wrote dream books listing over 100 common dreams and their meanings.

Years have passed and our quest to understand why we dream is still ongoing . All this time has passed and we still don’t have any definite answers. But there are seven main 'theories' to why we dream:

1. We Dream to Fullfill our Wishes: Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams.

In the early 1900s Sigmund theorised that dreams, including nightmares, are a collection of images from our daily conscious lives that mean something relating to the fulfilment of our subconscious wishes. Everything we remember from a dream is a a symbolic representation of our unconscious thoughts, desires and urges. If you analyse what you remember you will be able to work out what your unconscious repressed thoughts are trying to tell you. 2. We Dream to Remember: Memory, Sleep and Dreaming: Experience Consolidation by Erin J. Wamsley and Robert Stickgold.

Sleeping is good but dreaming is better. In 2010 Wamsley and Stickgold theorised that you can perform tasks better if you have dreamt about them, that certain memory processes can only happen when someone is dreaming. They did a study involving a maze that proves this. 3. We Dream to Forget: The reverse learning theory of dreaming, by Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison.

In 1983 Crick and Mitchison theorised that when you are in the REM cycle your brain sorts through information dumping what it deems unless and a dream is created from this process. If we didn't unlearn anything our brains would become overcrowded and we wouldn't be able to complete simple tasks without getting confused. 4. We Dream to Keep our Brains Working: The Continual Activation Theory of Dreaming by Jie Zhang.

Zhang theorised that the brain needs to constantly consolidate and create long term memories in order to function so when we sleep it automatically triggers a generation of data creating a dream. It is like your brain needs to have a random screensaver to keep it from crashing. 5. We Dream to Rehearse: Dreaming and Consciousness: Testing the Threat Simulation Theory of the Function of Dreaming by Antti Revonsuo and Katja Valli.

It has been proven that dangerous and anxious dreams are more common, or just more commonly remembered. Revonsuo and Valli theorised that the content of a dream is significant as it is our brains way of making us practise flight or flight. However the dream doesn't always have a to unpleasant. 6. We Dream to Heal: Overnight Therapy? The Role of Sleep in Emotional Brain Processing by Els van der Helm and Matthew P. Walker.

Helm and Walker theorised that dreaming take the edge off painful experiences as the section of the brain that deals with stress isn't very active during REM sleep, therefor the experience of pain and unrest will be less painful. They believe that your brain is making you practice painful experiences so you are ready for the real world. For example, people suffering from PTSD have struggle sleeping so scientists believe a lack of dreams results in their slow healing process. 7. We Dream to Solve Problems: The "Committee of Sleep": A Study of Dream Incubation for Problem Solving by Deirdre Barrett.

Barrett theorised there are limitless possibilities in what can happen in your dreams which helps us to understand problems and create solutions that you might not otherwise have thought of whilst awake. There are people that have thought of inventions in their dreams. It is also how the phrase sleep on it came about.

From this research it is apparent that the true reason for us dreaming has not yet been discovered but there are many plausible theories as to why we do.

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As no one knows why we dream, I want to create images that aren't straightforward. I don't want to give a lot away about what the dreams are about as 95% of the time people don't even remember them themselves.

I am going to create a set of images that show how dreams are weirdly amazing things and how wonderful our brains are for creating them. Whether it is to prepare us for the daunting things that are out there, or our brains sifting through information helping us remember what is important or just the fact our brains need a screensaver to keep it ticking over.