Post by BugHunter on Oct 5, 2003 15:54:28 GMT -5
Mrs. Reider is awesome 
But anyway, check out this article I read about Dreams and what they Mean, oooohhhh, hehe
-------------------------------------------------
Inside the World of Dreams
by:
I know this guy who had brilliant ideas in his dreams, but he could never remember them later. So he decided to keep a notebook beside his bed. He figured the next time he had a great inspiration he would write it down.
Sure enough, that very night, a genius idea struck him, and he did manage to wake up and jot it down. The next morning, he opened his notebook and read:
"Next time you have a great idea, write it down!"
Are dreams really so profound?
They fascinate us, that's for sure. But what are they? Why do they seem so real? Why are they so hard to remember? What do they mean? And how can we get at those meanings?
Back in college, I took a course on dreaming. Back then, serious researchers were spouting an unusual theory: Dreams are meaningless. Just chatter. Brain cells firing at random.
As far as I know, these researchers were and remain alone. Everyone else seems pretty sure that dreams mean something. According to the Bible, Joseph interpreted Pharaoh's dreams as predictions of the future. According to a Paiute Indian belief, a powerful dreamer can find where to hunt and even lure the game closer. The Aborigines of Australia say dreams are visits to a place called Dream Time where the world was created.
Throughout history, personalities great and small have turned to dreams for advice and inspiration. Genghis Khan, for example, had two legendary dreams. The first one allegedly told him, "Go out, conquer China!" And the second one said, "Now conquer the rest."
Freud and Jung
Today, most of us rely on science to tell us of what dreams are made. But before we get to that, let's talk about Sigmund Freud. Why? Because he was the Aristotle of dream theory. Come on, man, ya' gotta' start with Freud!
And what are dreams, according to this giant of psychoanalysis? Wish fulfillments. They express repressed desires and fantasies that churn about in a basement area of the mind called the unconscious.
So shocking are these fantasies, said Freud, that if we saw them in raw form, we would be so horrified and disgusted that we would wake up. For the sake of a good night's sleep, we disguise them with innocuous symbolism.
Freud's student Carl Jung took a broader view. He saw the mind as a many-layered thing. At the top is a sunlit place called consciousness, where each of us is our own particular self. Below this is the same basement room Freud spoke of, the personal unconscious. Below this, however, are more primitive mental structures. Deepest down is the collective unconscious, where each person's mind is joined to all humanity's.
Dreams, said Jung, are messages from this collective unconscious to our conscious self. To interpret one, Jung would say, look for archetypes: mythic images that stand for primordial realities such as death and change. A faceless stranger might be the Shadow Self, our capacity for evil. A moon might be the anima, our psyche's female aspect.
Verrry interesting, doctor. But how does this theory correlate to physiology--to whatever's physically happening when we dream?
Freud and Jung are now stammering that they're late for an appointment. If we want answers to this question, we must consult, ahem, Real Scientists--the folks who test and measure and weigh and count.
What real science says
Real Scientists say: Never mind about dreams, what's up with sleep? A sleeping creature is defenseless. Anything with teeth can sneak up on it. Why would nature arrange for any creature to do such a weird thing as sleep?
It's obvious, you say? To let the body rebuild itself?
Nope. Body cells regenerate quite nicely without sleep. All you need is rest. Kick back in your La-Z-boy with a tall lemonade, and you've got it made. But instead, we lose consciousness. Why?
To rest our brains?
Nope again. Sleeping brains are not resting. In fact, brain wave monitors show that our brains are even busier when we're asleep than when we're awake. Hello? Busy doing what?
Let us scan some background information turned up by Real Scientists.
To sleep, perchance to REM ...
There are two kinds of sleep: one called "rapid eye movement" or REM sleep, and S-synchronized or non-REM (NREM) sleep. Most dreams take place during REM sleep. During REM sleep your muscles are relaxed, but your eyes are moving around rapidly under your closed eyelids. Everybody does it, which means that everybody dreams.
Yes, everybody goes into REM sleep from four to six times a night. Each session lasts from 10 to 20 minutes. The first one starts about 90 minutes after sleep comes creeping in on its little cat feet.
If you don't get to REM, buddy, you're in big trouble. Researchers have confirmed this by having people sleep in their lab and waking them up every time they enter REM sleep. The researchers have another group of test subjects sleeping in the next room. These folks are woken just as often, but only after they finish a REM session. Both groups get the same amount of sleep, but only one gets to dream.
The people in the latter group do fine. Whatever sleep they lost, they don't seem to need it. But the ones who are prevented from going into REM sleep? They go to pieces. After six or seven nights, they get irritated, nervous, anxious, confused, disoriented, paranoid--and then they begin hallucinating.
To sleep, perchance to dream? There's no perchance about it. We sleep in order to dream! We need to dream, or we go crazy. In fact, animal studies suggest that dream deprivation will kill us even faster than food deprivation.
We need dreams more than food? Wow! What are these things?
A plausible answer
The most plausible theory I've heard was put forward by the late Christopher Evans, a British psychologist and computer scientist. Evans compared the human brain to a computer. Both, he pointed out, are networks that carry electrical signals. Switches and gates route these signals to form meaningful patterns. In the brain, the switches are nerve cells, and the network comprises the fibers connecting these cells. The patterns burned into our neural networks by our experiences are analogous to a computer's programs, Evans said.
Computers can't keep processing information if the nature of the information changes or the task (the desired output) is redefined. The computer has to come offline while obsolete lines of code are deleted, new routines are added, and the updated programs are tested.
The brain is subject to the same imperative, Evans says. We operate in a constantly changing environment. Every day our tasks are redefined and our senses are bombarded.
New information goes into a holding area called short-term memory. From there, some of it goes into permanent storage (what's known as working memory). But it can't just all be dumped in there. Our brain has to decide which impressions are keepers and file them appropriately. "Appropriately" means checking them against old information and assigning meaning to them.
For example, if a big dog bit you today, you have to file "big dog" near "ouch" with a direct connection to "run for your life." Every day people have thousands of items like that to sort and file.
Sleeping, said Evans, is like going offline. Dreaming is the process of sorting and filing our latest impressions and then updating our relevant "programs." If we don't do this regularly, one can predict that our brain's programs--all our concepts, built-in reactions, and emotional patterns--will gradually diverge from the real world. We'll end up dazed, disoriented, and dysfunctional--which is what happens to people who don't get to dream.
Evans, I believe, was onto something. If "program" sounds cold, substitute "script." Think of it this way: We function, actually, not in the world given to us by our senses, but in a mental model of the world we've created and carry around with us. Right now, my senses tell me I am sitting on a hard, greenish surface under a blue covering, tapping at some little black cubes. But my mind tells me I am on a playground behind a school library, using my laptop.
And my mental model is not just a snapshot of this moment. It's a narrative that exists in time: a life story, of which setting is just one aspect. All of us have a story, featuring ourselves as the main character, and we're inside it at every moment, hovering between the story-so-far and in-the-next-episode, with the outcome always in doubt.
The nature of this drama is not set in concrete. Each day's new information requires an updating of The Script.
Is mine the heartwarming story of a plucky gadfly who makes good? The tragic tale of one man caught between hope and heartache? A rollicking sitcom about a good-natured buffoon who can't seem to do anything right?
I don't know. Let me sleep on it. I'll tell you in the morning.
Source:encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/Columns/?Article=dreaming
------------------------------------------------------------
good stuff huh? ;D
But anyway, check out this article I read about Dreams and what they Mean, oooohhhh, hehe
-------------------------------------------------
Inside the World of Dreams
by:
I know this guy who had brilliant ideas in his dreams, but he could never remember them later. So he decided to keep a notebook beside his bed. He figured the next time he had a great inspiration he would write it down.
Sure enough, that very night, a genius idea struck him, and he did manage to wake up and jot it down. The next morning, he opened his notebook and read:
"Next time you have a great idea, write it down!"
Are dreams really so profound?
They fascinate us, that's for sure. But what are they? Why do they seem so real? Why are they so hard to remember? What do they mean? And how can we get at those meanings?
Back in college, I took a course on dreaming. Back then, serious researchers were spouting an unusual theory: Dreams are meaningless. Just chatter. Brain cells firing at random.
As far as I know, these researchers were and remain alone. Everyone else seems pretty sure that dreams mean something. According to the Bible, Joseph interpreted Pharaoh's dreams as predictions of the future. According to a Paiute Indian belief, a powerful dreamer can find where to hunt and even lure the game closer. The Aborigines of Australia say dreams are visits to a place called Dream Time where the world was created.
Throughout history, personalities great and small have turned to dreams for advice and inspiration. Genghis Khan, for example, had two legendary dreams. The first one allegedly told him, "Go out, conquer China!" And the second one said, "Now conquer the rest."
Freud and Jung
Today, most of us rely on science to tell us of what dreams are made. But before we get to that, let's talk about Sigmund Freud. Why? Because he was the Aristotle of dream theory. Come on, man, ya' gotta' start with Freud!
And what are dreams, according to this giant of psychoanalysis? Wish fulfillments. They express repressed desires and fantasies that churn about in a basement area of the mind called the unconscious.
So shocking are these fantasies, said Freud, that if we saw them in raw form, we would be so horrified and disgusted that we would wake up. For the sake of a good night's sleep, we disguise them with innocuous symbolism.
Freud's student Carl Jung took a broader view. He saw the mind as a many-layered thing. At the top is a sunlit place called consciousness, where each of us is our own particular self. Below this is the same basement room Freud spoke of, the personal unconscious. Below this, however, are more primitive mental structures. Deepest down is the collective unconscious, where each person's mind is joined to all humanity's.
Dreams, said Jung, are messages from this collective unconscious to our conscious self. To interpret one, Jung would say, look for archetypes: mythic images that stand for primordial realities such as death and change. A faceless stranger might be the Shadow Self, our capacity for evil. A moon might be the anima, our psyche's female aspect.
Verrry interesting, doctor. But how does this theory correlate to physiology--to whatever's physically happening when we dream?
Freud and Jung are now stammering that they're late for an appointment. If we want answers to this question, we must consult, ahem, Real Scientists--the folks who test and measure and weigh and count.
What real science says
Real Scientists say: Never mind about dreams, what's up with sleep? A sleeping creature is defenseless. Anything with teeth can sneak up on it. Why would nature arrange for any creature to do such a weird thing as sleep?
It's obvious, you say? To let the body rebuild itself?
Nope. Body cells regenerate quite nicely without sleep. All you need is rest. Kick back in your La-Z-boy with a tall lemonade, and you've got it made. But instead, we lose consciousness. Why?
To rest our brains?
Nope again. Sleeping brains are not resting. In fact, brain wave monitors show that our brains are even busier when we're asleep than when we're awake. Hello? Busy doing what?
Let us scan some background information turned up by Real Scientists.
To sleep, perchance to REM ...
There are two kinds of sleep: one called "rapid eye movement" or REM sleep, and S-synchronized or non-REM (NREM) sleep. Most dreams take place during REM sleep. During REM sleep your muscles are relaxed, but your eyes are moving around rapidly under your closed eyelids. Everybody does it, which means that everybody dreams.
Yes, everybody goes into REM sleep from four to six times a night. Each session lasts from 10 to 20 minutes. The first one starts about 90 minutes after sleep comes creeping in on its little cat feet.
If you don't get to REM, buddy, you're in big trouble. Researchers have confirmed this by having people sleep in their lab and waking them up every time they enter REM sleep. The researchers have another group of test subjects sleeping in the next room. These folks are woken just as often, but only after they finish a REM session. Both groups get the same amount of sleep, but only one gets to dream.
The people in the latter group do fine. Whatever sleep they lost, they don't seem to need it. But the ones who are prevented from going into REM sleep? They go to pieces. After six or seven nights, they get irritated, nervous, anxious, confused, disoriented, paranoid--and then they begin hallucinating.
To sleep, perchance to dream? There's no perchance about it. We sleep in order to dream! We need to dream, or we go crazy. In fact, animal studies suggest that dream deprivation will kill us even faster than food deprivation.
We need dreams more than food? Wow! What are these things?
A plausible answer
The most plausible theory I've heard was put forward by the late Christopher Evans, a British psychologist and computer scientist. Evans compared the human brain to a computer. Both, he pointed out, are networks that carry electrical signals. Switches and gates route these signals to form meaningful patterns. In the brain, the switches are nerve cells, and the network comprises the fibers connecting these cells. The patterns burned into our neural networks by our experiences are analogous to a computer's programs, Evans said.
Computers can't keep processing information if the nature of the information changes or the task (the desired output) is redefined. The computer has to come offline while obsolete lines of code are deleted, new routines are added, and the updated programs are tested.
The brain is subject to the same imperative, Evans says. We operate in a constantly changing environment. Every day our tasks are redefined and our senses are bombarded.
New information goes into a holding area called short-term memory. From there, some of it goes into permanent storage (what's known as working memory). But it can't just all be dumped in there. Our brain has to decide which impressions are keepers and file them appropriately. "Appropriately" means checking them against old information and assigning meaning to them.
For example, if a big dog bit you today, you have to file "big dog" near "ouch" with a direct connection to "run for your life." Every day people have thousands of items like that to sort and file.
Sleeping, said Evans, is like going offline. Dreaming is the process of sorting and filing our latest impressions and then updating our relevant "programs." If we don't do this regularly, one can predict that our brain's programs--all our concepts, built-in reactions, and emotional patterns--will gradually diverge from the real world. We'll end up dazed, disoriented, and dysfunctional--which is what happens to people who don't get to dream.
Evans, I believe, was onto something. If "program" sounds cold, substitute "script." Think of it this way: We function, actually, not in the world given to us by our senses, but in a mental model of the world we've created and carry around with us. Right now, my senses tell me I am sitting on a hard, greenish surface under a blue covering, tapping at some little black cubes. But my mind tells me I am on a playground behind a school library, using my laptop.
And my mental model is not just a snapshot of this moment. It's a narrative that exists in time: a life story, of which setting is just one aspect. All of us have a story, featuring ourselves as the main character, and we're inside it at every moment, hovering between the story-so-far and in-the-next-episode, with the outcome always in doubt.
The nature of this drama is not set in concrete. Each day's new information requires an updating of The Script.
Is mine the heartwarming story of a plucky gadfly who makes good? The tragic tale of one man caught between hope and heartache? A rollicking sitcom about a good-natured buffoon who can't seem to do anything right?
I don't know. Let me sleep on it. I'll tell you in the morning.
Source:encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/Columns/?Article=dreaming
------------------------------------------------------------
good stuff huh? ;D
I'll type up my essay and post it so you can see this thing. An 85..hmm, not bad, though. 
