Sleep And Dreaming
...of insight, personal enrichment, and life affirming revelations. Dreams are the language
of a person's subconscious mind. Before a person starts to dream, there are certain
cycles or stages that a person goes through in their sleep. Sleeping is important to our
lives.
Many people spend about twenty five years sleeping and dreaming. There are
four-ninety minute stages of sleep that a person goes through a night. To begin with
stage one. This is when breathing is regular, heart rate slows down, and blood pressure
decreases. A person could still be awake during this stage. Slowly the person drifts to
stage two. During this stage, the person is unaware of what is going on in the outside
surroundings. As the person falls deeper into sleep, the person goes into stage three
and four. It is harder to wake someone up when they reached this stage. It takes about
an hour for a person to go through all four stages. Yet, not everyone goes through all of
these stages a night. Throughout the night, stages four and five repeated. REM (rapid
eye movement) takes place when a person is at the deepest level of sleep. In REM,
eyes move quickly under the eyelid. Dreaming takes place at this stage. Dreams occur
more often and they are more real at this stage. These dreams are story like, intense,
and passionate. (Encarta-psychology, CD-ROM)
There are many ways to look at dreams. The psychoanalytic, biological, and
cognitive views of dreaming. In psychoanalytic view, Freud came up with a theory called
the "wish-fulfillment theory." Wish-fulfillment theory is " dream a interpretation that
emphasizes the roles of the manifestation content of dreams" (Huffman, Vernoy, and
Vernoy, 139). In a psychoanalytic view, they say that dreams are hidden signs of
suppresses needs. In a biological perspective, they believe that dreams are not
important- they are...
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