Sleep has always been one of the general components of human existence. What is more, sleep quality has a crucial effect on a person’s condition during the day. It is necessary to sleep well and have enough hours per night to be able to live the day through in a good mood and to have strengths for it. This paper states the general purpose of dreaming and my sleep habits.
To tell you the truth, I try to go to bed at the same time every night, from ten to eleven o’clock in the evening, but it does not always work. I may go to bed later than I have to, mainly because of visiting parties on weekends. Besides, I usually sleep from seven to nine hours a night, but I rarely feel well in the morning. The aspects that may explain these circumstances are that I do usually go to bed very tired after a productive day and illness that also affects my fatigue and, as a result, sleep. I could be a better sleeper if I felt relaxed and nothing bothered me before bedtime. Moreover, I should get better, not feel bad and get enough sleep.
Nevertheless, it is essential to speak about my dreams. In my personal opinion, I do usually dream for several reasons. Firstly, my imagination generates a case that is a mixture of my thoughts during the day and my memories. Secondly, I do not sleep soundly, and I am in a shallow sleep phase most of the night. The only pattern that I have noticed in these three days is that I dream about school-related actions. This pattern is the consistency between the things I do during the day and my dreams.
Some ideas explain what we dream of and why. Different cultures have dreams based on their basis of life. For example, people in hunter-gatherer societies have many dreams about animals, and people in dangerous societies have dreams about being victims of violent aggression (Kalat, 2016). People’s brains represent the most common things they watch and think of in their dreams. This fact means that people’s dreams depend on their lifestyle.
In describing the causes of our dreams, it is necessary to apply the following theories. The first is a theory of the Austrian physician Sigmund Freud, who asserts that dreams reveal the dreamer’s unconscious thoughts and motivations. Each dream has manifest content – the content that appears on the surface – and latent content – the hidden ideas that the dream experience represents symbolically (Kalat, 2016). This means that people often dream about what they think of lately before bedtime, and their brain expresses their surface thoughts with the ideas that they have not thought about for a long time, but that are clearly embedded in their minds.
One more theory to mention is the activation-synthesis theory of dreams. According to Kalat (2016), the theory states that dreams occur because the cortex takes the haphazard activity that occurs during REM sleep plus whatever stimuli strike the sense organs and does its best to make sense of this activity. It means that the brain activates people’s muscles to react to a certain situation in a dream. For example, when people try to run or jump in vain while sleeping, the brain sends messages to muscles to move but receives nothing, and that is why they cannot do these activities.
Reference
Kalat, J. W. (2016). Introduction to Psychology (11th ed.). Cengage Learning.