Dreams: Unconscious Mind and non Rem Sleep Essays

Submitted By crystalyowalker
Words: 1046
Pages: 5

Dreams By: Tyrone Walker 4-23-2013

. Dreams are kind of in a world of their own, however having a psychological sort of understanding of how the unconscious works it can offer a little bit of explanation of your dreams. Dreams have always sort of fascinated me in one way or another. With dreams they are so complex however sometimes so simple. We have these dreams that sometimes people feel are related to what is currently going on in our lives, as well as possible things to come in the future for us. For years there has been many a scientist that has tried to figure out our dreams. They have tried to figure out what they mean to use as well as how we can use them in our everyday lives. Some people have tried to figure out the best ways to decipher them, their meanings, and why our sub-conscious chooses this time in our lives to appear. According SIgmund Freud was considered to be the father of psychoanalysis. Freud bagan to analyze subjects dreams so that he could fully understand all of the aspects of personality as they relate to pathology. Freud also believed that nothing that we as humans do actually occur by chance but that all of our actions and thoughts are somehow motivated by our unconscious in some way shape or form. ("Dream Theorists", 2000-2012). The thing about Freuds beliefs are if his way of thinking is correct about our bodies than at some point all of the actions, thoughts, or impulses that we surpress during our waking hours will need to come to the surface in some sort of a disguised form. This can be done via our dream world. The reason why our bodies may choose to release our withheld emotions this way is because generally whats inside of our unconscious state of mind can be extremly violent or disturbing. This is where Freud's view comes in to play. According to "Dream Theorists" (2000-2012), “Freud believes that the unconscious expresses itself in a symbolic language.
Freud categorizes aspects of the mind into three parts:
Id - centered around primal impulses, pleasures, desires, unchecked urges and wish fulfillment.
Ego - concerned with the conscious, the rational, the moral and the self-aware aspect of the mind.
Superego - the censor for the id, which is also responsible for enforcing the moral codes of the ego. The ID's impulses and urges are typically being supressed by the superego. However in our dream world our superego is on a sort of temporary hiatus allowing our unconscious desires to show us what they are really thinking. The issue with our ID is that it can be very vulgar at times which causes our body to naturally try to turn it into something that is a little less disturbing by our society's standards. By our bodies naturally doing this it helps us to actually stay asleep and not waking up thinking of the axe that you were just holding trying to kill your mother in law. But by this sort of filtering that is done by our superego to protect our conscious mind from the things that our unconscious mind has conjured up sometimes our minds have to struggle to make sense of it all.

THE BIOLOGY OF SLEEP No matter how hard or what a person may do to try to stay awake in the end they will still need to go to sleep. Sleep is one of our bodies biological rhythms. Which means that sleep for our bodies is a natural cycle that our body must go through despite what a person may or may not want.( BSCS, 2003) Some other examples of this are menstruation, menopause, your heartbeat, basically things of that nature. There are two kinds of sleep REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and non REM (NREM) sleep. REM sleep is an active stage of sleep. During this active stage of sleep is where most of our dreaming occurs as well as tossing and turning. 90 percent of the dreaming is