Download The Role of Dreaming in Maintaining Homeostasis and Revealing Psychological Insights - Pro and more Papers Psychology in PDF only on Docsity! Samuel Jhas Robinson October 6, 2008 Intro to Psych Recitation Nathaniel Kirk What is it to Dream? Dreaming is a physiological process to ensure homeostasis that has some very interesting psychological side effects. During the night deep sleep allows the brain to rest and recuperate. However, the inactivity of the brain during this rest period causes the temperature of the brain to drop. Because the brain must be kept at a fairly static temperature, there must be some way to warm the brain up during the night. This temperature regulation is achieved through a period of sleep known as rapid-eye-movement or REM. During REM sleep the eyes dart around behind the eyelids and the brain becomes highly active. This activity warms the brain back up to an acceptable temperature. Evidence for this lies in the fact that mammals and birds have REM sleep, mammals and birds are also the only animals that regulate body temperature. “There’s no good evidence that any cold-blooded animal has REM sleep. REM sleep heats up the brain and non-REM cools it off…It seems likely that REM sleep is filling a basic physiological function and dreams are a kind of epiphenomenon” (p. 106). Therefore, the reason we dream is simply to maintain homeostasis. However, the result of this high level of activity, the content of our dreams, can be used as a psychological tool. If certain things are bothering us they show up in our dreams. Also, subconscious thought is contained and manifested in our dreams. However, dreams must occur whether or not there is any significant subject that can be dreamt about. This poses the biggest problem to our understanding of dreams and also to our ability to use them as a psychological tool. Dreams are highly subjective. It is impossible to read someone’s emotion or subconscious thought from their dreams because it is impossible to tell whether the dream is actually the manifestation of a problem in their life or simply a completely random series of images. And even if one was sure that the dream held meaningful information it would be impossible to discern its meaning. Dreaming about a mailbox could mean a certain thing to one person and something completely different to someone else, because a mailbox means completely different things to different people. For example, two people have a reoccurring dream about a hot dog. Maybe one person is subconsciously expressing his desire to have a closer relationship with his father because when he was young his father and he went to baseball games and they used to always get a hotdog. However, the other person had once gotten food poisoning from a hot dog and so his reoccurring dream was a manifestation of his fear of hospitals and sickness. This is a completely ridiculous example but you see my point. Without knowing an extreme amount of background information about the two people you wouldn’t even know how to start examining this dream. Another problem with reading into the meaning of dreams is the reliability of the recollection of a dream. It is extremely hard to remember a lot about a dream. Even if you are woken up in REM sleep the details of your dream will start to fade extremely fast. So how can one be sure they are interpreting a dream correctly when the person could be leaving out crucial details because they can’t remember them.
