The Rough Guide to Psychology An Introduction to Human Behaviour and the Mind (Rough Guides)

YOUR BRAIN

and deeply involved in our latest dreamy adventure there’s a kind of
paralysis mechanism that makes sure we don’t accidentally get up to any
real-life mischief. It does this by blocking the signals that go from the
brain to our muscles (there are a few exceptions – such as those used for
breathing and the signal that leads to early-morning erections!). But this
paralysis mechanism can go awry, occasionally with tragic consequences.

The meaning of dreams

Contrary to popular wisdom, dreams occur during both REM and

non-REM sleep but in the latter case they are usually shorter, and less

vivid and intricate. When we’re in a dream, we usually think it’s real. On

rare occasions we have a “lucid dream”, which is when we’re in a dream

and we know it, in some cases with the ability to deliberately control

the fantasy that unfolds.

Science still hasn’t solved the mystery of why we dream. Psychologists

are divided between those who see dreaming as a meaningless side

effect of sleep and those who believe dreams are connected to our

waking lives in some meaningful way. In line with common experience,

research has confirmed that what we get up to when we’re awake can

affect the content of our dreams – what Freud dubbed “day-residue”.

What’s more contentious is whether the content of your dreams

reveals anything significant about you and your desires that would

remain hidden if it weren’t for the dream. Freud, rather famously,

believed that dreams provide the “royal road to the unconscious” and

that decoding the symbolism

in dreams can reveal a

person’s hidden wishes. By

contrast, some contempo-

rary experts have proposed

that dreams occur when the

brainstem randomly stimu-

lates memories and that

these stirrings are trans-

lated into a semi-coherent

narrative by the cortex. By

this account, dreams are

the subjective consequence

of haphazard physiological

events and any attempts to

extract deeper meaning from

them amounts to little more

than wishful thinking on the

part of the interpreter. Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (c.1790).