Dreams are series of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. When a person is dreaming they believe that is their reality. Lucid dreaming usually occurs during REM sleep. During lucid dreaming, a dreamer may be able to have some form of control over the dream characters, storyline, and environment. Therefore, the movie Inception is a very accurate portrayal of the idea of lucid dreaming. Philosophers and psychologists have debated on whether lucid dreaming is real or not. In 1959 Norman Malcolm said, “The only criterion of the truth of a statement that someone has had a certain dream is, essentially, his saying so.” (Brooks,2016). Which makes a good point because …show more content…
“The first published mention of lucid dreaming and its scientific potential was by Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys in 1867” (Busby,2013). The idea of lucid dreaming was not really thought of by many until Saint-Denys’s wrote about them and even then not many people believed him. In 1913. Frederick Van Eden, a Dutch psychologist, was the first to come up with the term lucid dreaming. According to Lambert (p.2), the Tibetan Buddhist had been practicing a similar version of lucid dreaming but it was called “dream yoga”. In which, the individual probes their consciousness and bring you to a constant state of awareness. Therefore, the lucid dreamer recognizes the dream as a dream and nothing more. They navigate through the dream and discover how they think and obstacles their minds put, which is similar to the idea of lucid dreaming, the most well-known scientist is Stephen Laberge who runs the Lucidity Institute. At the institute, he has workshops where he actually teaches people how to have lucid dreams. LaBerge truly sparked the more in depth research on lucid dreaming.
Another scientist studying the concept of lucid dreaming is Dr. Matthew Walker who proposed his own theory on lucid dreaming. According to Lambert (p.2), he believes that the
Skepticism is the force that drives philosopher to continue challenging the unquestioned mass opinions. Skeptics are people who deny that we have knowledge about a specific subject. For example, a skeptic of the external world believes that we do not have any knowledge of the external world due to our perception of the world. Skepticism of the outside world argues that due to our perception, we are unable to have knowledge of the outside world. For instance, our eyes have deceived us do to illusions, like when hot asphalt looks like it has water on it.
PBS’s, Nova What Are Dreams, is a forty-five-minute documentary about how different stages of sleep effect our dreams. Throughout the documentary, we also witness how dreaming is essential for making sense of the world around us. For nearly a century, many thought when one is asleep the brain is asleep as well. Yet not until technology advanced, did scientists begin examining sleeping patients to notice every ninety minutes their patients brain showed activity as if they were awake but were still unconscious.
For example, if someone had the desire to write a book, they would write copious amounts of drafts and edit all their work. Also, it might take several times to figure out everything. Dreams are not a one-step process. They take time, but there will be time. In a minute there is time for a hundred visions and revisions.
The modern science of lucid dreaming covers last forty years and it starts with the work of Keith Hearne at the University of Hull and Stephen LaBerge at Stanford. What they separately realized was that “a dreamer could become lucidly aware in a dream and possibly ‘signal’ his awareness by moving his eyes left to right a predetermined number of times” (Blackmore, 1991). Hearne, working in the sleep lab with the talented lucid dreamer, Alan Worsley, captured this eye-signal verification evidence in April 1975 on the rapid eye movement polygraph readout. LaBerge, using himself as the lucid dreaming subject in the Stanford sleep lab, captured his first lucid eye-signals in February 1978. The studies proved that the subjects had indeed been lucid during uninterrupted REM sleep, which became the first evidence that being consciously aware in the dream state is possible.
To dream is to desire an achievement which seems unobtainable. Most everyone has trouble convincing themselves that their dreams are within reach. Jim Carrey once said, “So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality.” This is a result of allowing dreams to remain dreams and, instead, opting to take a more reliable path. In doing so, a sense of emptiness that never completely dies out is often developed.
Allan. Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.
A client needed to work with the therapist to ‘decode’ the dreams and gain access on one’s “repressed” information about self. Carl Gustav Jung (1875- 1961) was a “Neo- Freudian”. Though he agreed with some parts of Freud’s work, he rejected and modified other portions. Jung disagreed with Freud’s idea that dreams contained hidden meanings that needed to be interpreted, i.e. he rejected the idea of a “manifest content”. Jung formulated a new theory on dreams.
The “why we dream argument see dreams as only nonsense that the brain creates from fragments of images and memory” (Obringer). On this side of the argument dreams are viewed as tricks of the mind that just seem to happen. Other people believe differently. Some people believe dreams have meaning even if we don’t recognize it at first. “Many think dreams are full of symbolic messages that may not be clear to us on the surface” (Obringer).
What does it mean to dream? Well, I believe dreams will always remain a mystery of phenomenons that science will never be able to explain. However, we can interpret our dreams in many different aspects. Philosophers, such as Alan Watts, interpret dreams in an interesting way, such as it being an adventure (The Dream of Life). From this, I’d like to think of dreams as adventures for our minds; we’re subconsciously wandering to a new adventure every time we decide to rest our eyes.
(Sometimes I had more than one dream in one night.) I will first say that my sleeping patterns are not at all constant. In fact, they seemed to bounce all over the place. I can confirm that everything that I dreamt about correlated with my thoughts during the day. So, to me, it seems obvious that my dreams are being based off of the cognitive approach to dreaming.
There have been many times in my life where I have either woken up in the middle of the night from a horrible nightmare or woke up in the morning trying to recall my dreams. I have spent a lot of time researching what my dreams mean. Although we have experienced countless dreams in our lifetime, do we ever stop to think: how dreams occur? How dreams affect our lives? Do dreams even mean anything?
My whole body was paralyzed and at that moment I was convinced that I was going to die. Daunting thoughts began to swell within my head and the yearning to cry was only thriving as the minutes passed. Sleeping had become a struggle ever since my parents had announced their divorce two months prior. Dealing with the consistent fighting of my parents during the day was enough to make me want to sleep eternally at night. However, after experiencing sleep paralysis for the first time I was then introduced to the enchanting world of lucid dreaming.
Today I first discussed when dream occurs. Second, I discussed theories of dream. Finally, I discussed the dream interpreter. Understanding when dream occurs, theories of dream and what they mean help us grasp what dreams actually
Hartman also includes that there has been some research that suggests that dreaming lies on a continuous sequence with other forms of mental functioning in the cerebral cortex. One side of this sequence
William A. Ward once said, “If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it”. If only this were always true; living would be so simple and easy. The idea behind a dream is that if an individual is ambitious and determined, he/she has a fair chance of fulfilling their goal, and the happiness that comes with it.