The Mind at Night

Nikia Lyons

PSY 1505

MWF- 2:00pm

4/5/07

The Mind at Night

By: Andrea Rock

The book call "The Mind at Night" by Andrea Rock is about how and why we as humans dream. The

author talks about in her book the different theories and experiments done over time to see what dreaming is

and does the dreams interpret things. It's impossible for scientists to agree on the real definition of dreaming.

Some say that its the creation of hallucinatory narratives complete with characters and a discernable

plotline that occurs primarily

during the period of rest known as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. This is a

stage where you are close to or approaching the waking stage. The sleeper's eyes move back and forth

behind closed eyelids.

There are other researchers that classify any mental activity that occurs during any stages of sleep as

dreaming, and even some agrue that dreamlike mental processes during waking states, for example

meditation should be included in this definition. The author defines dreaming as a mental experience during

sleep that can be described during waking consciousness.

Andrea breaks down the book basically by the different theories. In 1900, Sigmund Freud's book entitled

"The Interpretation of Dreams", he says that dreams spring from subconscious wishes (primarily sexual and

aggressive desires, which he called it the libidinal drive) that the censoring ego normally suppressed in waking

hours.

Then there was Eugene Aserinsky that had basically discovered the rapid eye movement. Since that

was discovered, that made William Dement interrested in the sleep research. He was beginning to look more

into REM and other stages of sleep.

William Dement found that healthy adults pass through five standard stages of sleep. The five stages are

as followed: Presleep period, Stage I sleep, Stage II sleep, slow-wave sleep, and REM sleep. Experiments

done by Dement and Aserinsky showed that dreams were more likely to be remembered when awaked from

REM.

Then comes J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley that's against Freud's theory of dreams. They

believed that REM is turned on when brainstem neurons flipped a switch that altered the brain's balance of

neuronmodulators that was in charge of activating and deactivating whole sections of the brain.

Mark Solms on the other hand was all for Freud's theory. He believed that dreams were created in a

more complex way than Hobson and McCarley theory. Solms was able to go around the neurosurgery

department at a hospital he was working in at the time and study every patient who had any type of brain

damage if it was caused by stroke, tumors, or traumatic injuries. He asked these patients how did this injury

affect their ability to dream. A lot of them claimed that they lost dreaming altogether. What Solms discovered

that most of the ones that said they lost dreaming altogether had damage done to the parietal lobe, which is the

portion of the brain that combines different forms of sensory information to create our sense of spatial

orientation and mental imagery. He also seen that there were patients that had damage to the brainstem that

reported to have dreams. When Hobson says that if the brainstem is damaged, that will stop dreaming. In

reality a damaged brainstem causes more intensed dreams. So Solms thought dreaming and REM were two

separate