The Role of Dreams in the Human Psyche

Plan 1) The history of day pipe dream perception in indigenous cultures. 2) The modern theories of snooze and dream provideation. 3) Jungs archetypes. The Meaning of Sleep and Dreams identified by Freud, Jung, and other theorists. We all dream. E precise night as we dim the unfounded of cognizantness we enter the acres of the dream. In this dream maintain our imagination runs free with little or no interference from our conscious attend. In the morning, when we awaken and return to consciousness, we may bring with us a recollection of the wanderings of our imagination we come back the dream.To dream is natural, it is a universal experience. All throng of all cultures enter into this dream commonwealth when they rest period. As sleep investigate has shown even animals dream. How we regard the dream, however, varies from culture to culture and from person to person. Originally the dream was held to be the voice of God. Most indigenous cultures hold that the dream is di rect by the Great Spirit and serves to stretch forth advice and instruction. This idea of the divinity of the dream can also to be found in ancient Egyptian and Greek society.In the Old Testament Jacob interprets a dream for the Egyptian pharaoh. Jacob explains that God has spoken to the pharaoh and warned of seven years of prosperity to be followed by seven years of famine. In Egypt and Greece the dream was considered as a message from the gods. The Egyptian populate believed that the gods revealed themselves in dreams, exclusively the soul was not transported to another place or time. The Egyptians believed that dreams served as warnings, advice, and prophecy (Agee, 2010) http//people. uncw. edu/deagona/ancientnovel (Diane Agee, 1).Both Egyptian and Greek society thither existed temples where one would go to dream and receive be restoreding or instruction from the gods. Homers Iliad (8th century BC) tells the story of Agamemnon who receives instruction from Zeus through a dre am. Another element of Homeric dream interpretation, similar to that of the Egyptians is that not all dreams atomic number 18 prophetic, so people had to attempt to distinguish between true dreams and false dreams. For example, in the Iliad Zeus sent a shoddy dream to King Agamemnon, which undermined his authority(Agee).In this coiffure the sleepers actively attempted contact with divine cosmoss. This practice reflects the Homeric view of dreams according to this view the dream was not conceived as internal experience, a state of mind, or a message from the irrational unconscious to the conscious swelled head. Rather, it was an objectified messenger, a supernatural agent sent by a deity (Parman pg. 18)(Agee). Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, used dreams as a diagnostic aid. In the near East the dream was considered to be a source of divine inspiration.Mohammed, the founding prophet of the Islamic culture, is said to watch received much of what is written in the Kora n through his dreams. In Christian tradition the dream was vox populi of as the word of God, or the work of the devil. The biblical legacy pertaining to dreams is very important. on that point are descriptions of forty-three dreams in the Old Testament, while in the New Testament there are nine (including apparitions and visions) (Sokolovskii, p. 27). St. John Chrysostom preached that God revealed himself through dreams (The life of St. John Chrysostom, para. 5, thenewarchive. om, p. 229 ), whilst other church fathers, such as Martin Luther, viewed the dream as the work, not of God, but the Devil. According to Luther it was the church, and only the church, which was the conduit of Gods word. For Luther revelations made to people in dreams could only be diabolic (The Legacy of Martin Luther). http//home. inreach. com/bstanley/luther. htm In the Christian epoch the church and its scriptures supplanted the importance of the dream. The confidence of Christianity obscured the divinit y of the dream, which was nowadays considered superstitious.The rise of rationalism and science further undermined the think of of the dream. To this day skepticism toward the value dream frame the predominant attitude. In the early part of the 20th century, however, the dream was championed by both great psychologists, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. For Freud the dream revealed that which the dreamer would rather keep hidden. By exploring the dream one was forced to human face that which was suppressed and rejected within oneself. Jung had another theory. Jung felt that the dream acted as a mirror for the ego revealing that which was missing within the consciousness of the dreamer.For Jung the dream acted as a teacher and guide on the road toward wholeness. With the work of both Jung and Freud the dream regained its status as a source of wisdom and healing. A series of dreams would develop, balance and re very well the conscious awareness of the dreamer. Jung had rediscovered t he age-old wisdom of the dream and its capacity to heal and make whole. Apart from healing, the dreams also seemed to be encouraging and actively participating in the growth and learning of the personality. Jung termed this inherent drive of the soul as the force of individuation, the force by which we become whole and indivisible.Freud, The exposition of Dreams The conscious element of the dream lies in its remembrance, the unconscious element lies in its mystery and perplexity. Half conscious, one-half unconscious, the dream acts as a bridge between the known and the unknown. Physiological Theories and Stages of Sleep So now that we know why we need sleep, we need to know what is the thing, that actually puts us to sleep. Some may espy the name melatonin, because it is nightimes prescribed for jet-lag or sleep deprivation. But we also create this chemical interior our bodies, although it is in much smaller portions. ttp//library. thinkquest. org Melatonin is a endocrine glan d secreted from the pineal gland in the center of our witticism. It is released when our eye begin to register that the sun is beginning to set and darkness begins to fall. This is the hormone that makes you go to sleep and is also used in our body to regulate our sleep-wake cpss. If you wonder why older people hightail it to sleep less than younger people, it is because the amount of melatonin produced in our body seems to lessen as we age. Although sleep research has yielded a great deal of information on how we sleep, why we need to do so remains a mystery.There are two prominent theories of sleep chromosome mapping. One the restorative copy assumes that sleep exists to service the understanding in some air. According to this theory, non-REM sleep restores the relationship between the nervous scheme and muscles, glands, immune and other body systems. REM sleep maintains learning, reasoning and emotional balance. Another the adaptive model holds that sleep exists as an adaption to our biological clocks. Because it normally takes place during times of reduced physiological functions it may be a means of preserving button for the hours when it is needed (source Are you Getting Enough? Harvard Womens Health Watch, 1070910X. March 94, Vol. 1, Is. 7. academic Search Complete)Cortical and neurological theories of sleep compete with the neurohumoral theory, developed in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The brainstem theory, formulated in 1962, was associated with the discovery of a small region of cells in the brainstem thought responsible for dream generation and the secretion of acetylcholine. It gave way in the 1970s to the cortical-brainstem theory (the production of dopamine in the lobes of the brain was associated with dreaming). It became clear, moreover, that destruction of this group of cells due to injury leads to the extinction of dreams but not of the point of paradoxical sleep (Sokolovskii, p. 17). This poses the issue of the p resence or absence of dreams in animals. If animals do dream, their dreaming is plausibly limited to what Freud called Tagesreste (residues of daytime impressions) and childish dreams, the significance of which lies in the fulfillment of desires unfulfilled in the waking state(p. 17).The so called work of dreaming, which encodes the true meaning of a dream (condensation, displacement, symbolization, repression, and the other mechanisms of dreaming that make its satiate non-obvious and decodable only through interpretation), is apparently connected with the presence of developed language and with the play of signifiers and is conditioned by it (p. 17). It therefore cannot exist in animals that do not deplete such a developed second signal system. A typical nights sleep consists of a number of cycles lasting roughly 90 transactions in length. Each of these cycles is made up of four separate stages.During stage one, we are entering into light sleep. This stage is characterized b y Non-rapid eye movements (NREM), muscle relaxation, lowered body temperature and slowed heart rate. The body is preparing to enter into tardily sleep. Stage two is also characterized by NREM, this stage is characterized by a further drop in body temperature and relaxation of the muscles. The bodys immune system goes to work on repairing the days damage, the endocrine glands secrete grown hormone and blood is sent to the muscles to be reconditioned. In this stage, you are completely asleep. Stage three is just a deeper sleep.Your metabolic levels are extremely slow. And, finally, the famous REM, or rapid eye movement stage, occurs close every(prenominal) ninety minutes of sleep. In this stage of sleep, your eyes move back and forth erratically. It occurs at about 90-100 minutes after the onset of sleep. Your blood pressure rises, heart rate speeds up, respiration becomes erratic and brain activity increases (source). Your involuntary muscles also become paralyzed. It is called in the mnemonic for medical students as an awake brain in the paralyzed body, as opposed to stage one through three characterized as idle brain in the awake body.An EEG would record brain waves resembling those you would see when you are active. This stage is the most restorative part of sleep. Your mind is being revitalized and emotions are being fine tuned. The majority of your dreaming occurs in this stage. These stages repeat themselves throughout a nights sleep. (source) The following diagram shows our sleep cycle source Sleep Wake Cycle The Meaning of Sleep and Dreams Identified by Freud, Jung and other theorists The function of dreams is that by reproducing difficult or unsolved life situations or experiences, the dream aids towards a resolving power or resolution of the problems. pic Freud called dreaming the royal road to the unconscious Our personality as a whole, bid every organism, is working towards its own fulfillment. He connects this even more directly with the over all self-regulatory physical processes in saying There is in the encephalon an machine-driven movement toward readjustment, towards equilibrium, toward a restoration of the balance of our personality. This automatic adaptation of the organism is one of the main functions of the dream as indeed it is of bodily functions and of the personality as a whole.Dreams are the product of the unconscious mind . In the deeper state of Delta, our minds are resting even more fully and we are further distanced from the physical world. perhaps it is in this state that we can receive cues from the energy of people and situations that we are connected with in waking life or from Jungs collective unconscious. Since dreams were a way of communicating with the unconscious, Jung felt that the imageries in dreams were a way of revealing something about ourselves, our relationships with others, and situations in our waking life.Dreams guide our personal growth and helped to self achieve our potential. Often discussing what is currently going on in your life, helps to interpret and unlock the cryptic and bizarre images of your dreams. Jungs sleep theories are closely associated with his f archetypes. Jungs theory divides the psyche into three parts. The first is the ego, which Jung identified with the conscious mind. The second part is the personal unconscious, which includes anything which is not presently conscious, but can be. The personal unconscious includes both memories that re easily brought to mind and those that have been suppressed because of being painful or too difficult to accept as a part of reality for some people. But it does not include the instincts, or id aggressive drives, that Freud would have it include. But then Jung adds the part of the psyche that makes his theory stand out from all others the collective unconscious. You could call it your mental inheritance. It is the reservoir of our experiences as a species, a kind of knowledge we are all born with. And yet we can never be directly conscious of it.It influences all of our experiences and behaviors, most especially the emotional ones, but we only know about it indirectly, by looking at those influences. There are some experiences that show the effects of the collective unconscious more clearly than others The experiences of love at first sight, of deja vu (the feeling that youve been here before), and the immediate recognition of true symbols and the meanings of certain myths, could all be understood as the sudden conjunction of our outer reality and the intimate reality of the collective unconscious.Grander examples are the creative experiences shared by artists and musicians all over the world and in all times, or the spiritual experiences of mystics of all religions, or the parallels in dreams, fantasies, mythologies, fairy tales, and literature of different cultures. A nice example that has been greatly discussed recently is the near-death experience. It seems that many p eople, of many different cultural backgrounds, find that they have very similar recollections when they are brought back from a close encounter with death.They speak of leaving their bodies, beholding their bodies and the events surrounding them clearly, of being pulled through a long tunnel towards a bright light, of seeing deceased relatives or religious figures waiting for them, and of their disappointment at having to leave this happy scene to return to their bodies. Perhaps we are all built to experience death in this fashion. Quite a few people find that Jung has a great deal to say to them.They include writers, artists, musicians, film makers, theologians, and, of course, some psychologists. Examples that come to mind are the mythologist Joseph Campbell, the film maker George Lucas, and the science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin. Anyone interested in creativity, spirituality, psychic phenomena, the universal, and so on will find in Jung a kindred spirit. But scientists, i ncluding psychologists, have a lot of trouble with Jung.Not only does he fully support the teleological view (as do most personality theorists), but he goes a step further and talks about the hugger-mugger interconnectedness of synchronicity. Not only does he postulate an unconscious, where things are not easily available to the verifiable eye, but he postulates a collective unconscious that never has been and never will be conscious. There is still a lot of work to be done to connect our knowledge in physiology and psychological science of dreams.The French neurophysiologist Michel Jouvet, author of the novel Le chateau des songes The Castle of Dreams (Jouvet 2000) and discoverer of the phase of paradoxical sleep, examine 6,600 of his own dreams before concluding that two kinds of memorylong-term and short-termwere used in them. Physiologists have yet to reach a consensus concerning the mechanisms of sleep and dreaming.