Essay On Interpretation Of Dreams

INTRODUCTION

“The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” - Sigmund Freud

In our civilization, there is little we have not explored, little we have not discovered and little we do not know. Among that little is dream interpretation. Dream interpretation, like the name itself, refers to why we dream and what those dreams could potentially mean, should they have any meaning at all.

The history of dreams goes back all the way to the beginning of time. As long as humans have inhabited the Earth, we have had dreams and it has puzzled each and every culture so far. In the 3rd millennium BCE, Mesopotamian kings paid close attention to their dreams and recorded them on tablets in order to understand them. The Babylonians divided dreams into

However, the theory has been critiqued as it fails to account for lucid dreaming.

3. IN ORDER TO FORGET

This theory, also called reverse learning, was developed by Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison. The idea suggests that we dream in order to get rid of undesirable information and connections that build up throughout the day.

This theory states that as we learn and grow, more and more connections are made in our neocortex (a part of our brain). As the number of connections increase, we become less productive due to an overload of useless information. Crick and Mitchison predicted that if this were to happen, people might develop bizarre thoughts (from mixed up memories), hallucinations (from memories being associated with the wrong inputs) or obsessions (from the same connections being made over and over).

Therefore during REM sleep, the brain sends random stimuli to the neocortex, thereby weakening some connections and eliminating them.

4. IN ORDER TO REMEMBER

This theory refutes reverse