sleep and dreaming

• Sleep


  • Universal and instinctive
  • Keeps us safe in the dark
  • Promotes a healthy brain
  • Allows for physical repair
  • Provides emotional stability
• Stages of sleep


  1. Stage 1

  2. Stage 2

  3. Stage 3

  4. Stage 4

  5. REM sleep
• Endogenous pacemakers


  Internal biological body clocks that manage bodily rhythms in sleep
• Exogenous zeitgebers


  Features of the environment which can be physical or social for sleep
• Sleep onset insomnia


  Struggling to fall asleep
• Sleep maintenance insomnia


  Able to fall asleep but waking regularly throughout the night
• Unconscious mind


  Derives our behaviour, not accessible to conscious awareness
• Id


  Instinctive, primal drives and urges
• Ego


  Keeps us in touch with reality
• Superego


  Moral conscience
• Repression


  Pushing instincts into the unconscious mind
• Manifest content


  Actual content of a dream
• Latent content


  Underlying meaning of dream symbols
• Freud's theory of dreaming is too subjective, difficult to test, and based on unreliable research
• Freud's study of the Wolfman


  • Aim: Investigate the Wolfman's mental illness
  • Method: Case study, longitudinal
  • Sample: The Wolfman (Sergei Pankejeff)
  • Procedure: Analyzed the Wolfman's childhood dream
• Freud interpreted the Wolfman's dream as representing an unconscious desire to be seduced by his father, and the development of castration anxiety
• Criticisms of the Wolfman study include it being too subjective and relying on the Wolfman's memory
• Freud's interpretation of the Wolfman's dream was that the unconscious mind has a significant effect on behavior and traumatic events that are witnessed can be repressed but they may also resurface for example in a dream
• Criticisms of Freud's case study of the Wolfman


  • Too subjective - just Freud's view
  • Relies fully on the Wolfman's memory which could be inaccurate
  • Strong focus on the unconscious which cannot be observed
  • The Wolfman had mental health problems so findings may not generalise
  • Small sample size of one person
• Activation synthesis theory of dreaming


  • Developed by Hobson and McCauley in 1977
  • Powerful electrical signals pass through the brain during REM sleep, starting in the pons and activating the limbic system and occipital lobe
  • The brain tries to make sense of these random brain firings, resulting in dreams
• Criticisms of activation synthesis theory


  • Too reductionist - simplifies dreaming down to just neuronal firing
  • Dreams are not always random, they can relate to the day's events
  • Dreams can occur in non-REM sleep when brain activity is reduced
  • People with damaged brain stems still experience dreams
• Bizarreness in dreams and fantasies study


  • Aim: To assess bizarreness in dreams vs fantasies to show they are different processes
  • Method: Natural experiment with 12 Harvard students recording dreams and fantasies
  • Results: Dreams had significantly higher bizarreness scores than fantasies
• Criticisms of bizarreness in dreams and fantasies study


  • Relies completely on self-report, open to social desirability bias
  • Couldn't control when/how reports were written, details may have been forgotten or changed
  • Couldn't control if dreams were actually from REM sleep
  • Small sample size, mostly female participants
  • Oversimplified dreaming into a numerical bizarreness score
• Sleep hygiene


  • Avoiding caffeine, alcohol, large meals before bed
  • Ensuring a dark, quiet, mild temperature sleep environment
• Relaxation techniques for insomnia


  • Clearing the mind
  • Deep breathing
  • Relieving tension in the body
  • Rebalance the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems