Dreams

We call the mental activity that takes place during sleep dreaming. Everybody dreams, although most people are able to recall only a few, if any, of their dreams. Dreams are purely personal experiences, and the dreamer alone is witness to the dream. Areas of dream research I believe important are the physiological occurrence of dreams, dream content, and dream interpretation.

The physiological occurrence, or how the dream physically happen, could be one of the least understood subject in psychology. A dream begins in the brain steam and is controlled by two neurotransmitters that turn dreams "on" and "off". The "on switch" uses a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine to begin the dream and the "off switch" uses neurotransmitters called norepinephrine and serotonin to end it. When the two chemicals are suppressed, the acetylcholine allows electrical signals to be sent to the cortex of the brain. Norepinephrine and serotonin are also necessary to imprint messages in long-term memory, thought to be in the hippocampus of the brain, since the two chemicals are suppressed during the dreaming process, dreams cannot be stored in long-term memory. Also, brain scans reveal that a certain brain activity producing a wave known as a theta rhythm comes from the hippocampus, or memory part of the brain. Meanwhile the nerves that usually carry information from the outside world shut down.

Dream content is an important subject to understanding how the human mind works. Many psychologists believe that dream content can lead to major discoveries in the future. Sleep researchers sometimes make a point of waking study participants at regular intervals during the night to ask them about their dreams. The first few dreams are usually composed of vague thoughts left over from the day's activities. Some researchers have theorized that dreams are a way to wash away unconscience memory activity throughout the day. The dreams we remember and talk about are more coherent, and generally more interesting than the ones that go unremembered. This is proved in the Dement and Wolpert experiment in 1958 when a participant was woken up in regular intervals throughout the night. The participant reported that she was watching television and as the night wore on, the dreams became longer and more vivid and dramatic, especially dreams that take place in REM sleep. Hall and Van de Castle found in 1966 that many dreams are actually very commonplace, even dull; exemplifying the theory that dreams are a way of clearing out useless memories and thoughts that had occurred during the day. One theorist, Francis Crick, believes that dreams are the brain's way of removing certain