#Freud and dreams series

(Image: Francisco Goya/Public domain)ДЄs you may know, Sigmund Freud was one of the first people to discuss the purpose of dreaming in detail, and his perspective dominated work on dreaming for many years.ДЇreudвЂ™s psychoanalytic theory suggested that dreams reflect peopleвЂ™s unconscious thoughts and desires. вЂњThe Sleep of Reason Produces MonstersвЂќ, by the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya, 1799. So, on an average night, each of us dreams on four to six separate occasions. In a normal nightвЂ™s sleep, we cycle through the various stages of sleep several times, usually between four and six, and each of these cycles includes one stage of REM sleep.

#Freud and dreams series

They would wait just until participants in their sleep studies went into REM sleep, and then theyвЂ™d wake them up to record their dream.Д®ach night, we pass through a series of stages of sleep, each of which is associated with a distinctive pattern of brain waves. This discovery was important for many reasons, but one was that it allowed researchers to study dreams more carefully than they had in the past. But, when people are awakened when they arenвЂ™t in REM sleep-when their eyes are not moving around-they usually donвЂ™t report that they were dreaming. Years of research have confirmed that when people are awakened during REM sleep, they report that they have been dreaming 85 to 90 percent of the time. This was the discovery of whatвЂ™s called rapid eye movement sleep-or REM sleep. Learn more about solving psychological mysteries When the researchers woke participants up to see what was going on, the participants almost always reported that they had been dreaming. But in 1953, sleep researchers noticed that participants in their studies would sometimes flick their eyes back and forth rapidly under their closed eyelids as they slept. Until the 1950s, most scientists who studied sleep assumed that only a small portion of each nightвЂ™s sleep is taken up by dreams. (Image: javi_indy/Shutterstock) Early Sleep Research and Reasons For Dreaming