A dream is a display, usually visual, that occurs during the night while we sleep in order to deal with and asses the things that we have dealt with during the day. A dream isa remembered residue in the form of creatively assembled visual metaphors(Guiley).In 1900 Sigmund Freud wrote in the The Interpretation of Dreams that dreams aredisguised wishes arising from ones unconscious mind. Having been suppressed by theconscious mind, the wishes sneak into the sleeping brain in the form of dreams. Due toelectoencephalograph machine that recorded the rapid eye movement during sleep andresearch into the physical nature of dreaming, Freud's theory has been for the most partproven wrong. There is no definitive answer as to what a dream is. There is a raging debate overthe neuroscientific point of view and the psychoanalytical point of view about what it isthat actually causes dreams. In the next few paragraphs I will look at the proposedanswers from both the neuroscientific and psychoanalytical The process of dreaming starts in the brain stem and is controlled by twoneurotransmitters that in affect turn the dreams on and of. The one that turns the dreamson uses acetylcholine to begin the dream, and the part that turns the dream off usesnorepinephrine and serotonin to end the dream sequence.When the norepinephrine andserotonin are suppressed, the other chemical, acetylcholine allows electrical signals to thecortex. Norepinephrine and serotonin are necessary to imprint the dreams into your longterm memory. This may explain why we forget the majority of our dreams. Since the twochemicals are suppressed during the dreaming process, most dreams are not stored in thelong term memory of our minds.The brain stem neurons also start a sinusoidal wave known as theta rhythm thehippocampus, a brain structure that looks like a sea horse which is believed to beresponsible for the storage of memory. While this ...
