Informative Speech on Dreams free essay sample

INTRODUCTION II. (Reveal Topic) A dream is amazing and the way one interprets it depends on who is having the dream. III. (Credibility Statement)I have done a lot of research on the topic of Dream Interpretation and find that it varies from person to person. Some believe that a dream stems from a collaboration of your everyday experiences and past memories. Whereas others believe it is the brains way of getting excess memory out of the brain and that this is crucial for proper brain function. IV. (Relevancy Statement) Dream interpretation is important for everyone because being able to analyze the information in your own dreams can allow you to solve problems in reality. V. (Preview) Today I am going to talk about Dream interpretation. It is important because it allows us to see what a dream is, to find significance in our dreams, and to face our subconscious problems. We will write a custom essay sample on Informative Speech on Dreams or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page BODY I. I’m sure most, if not all of you have experienced what it is like to dream. But what exactly is a dream? To define a dream, we first must define sleep. Sleep is the most important aspect of dreaming, without sleep you cannot dream. 1. There are two specific parts of sleeping. In an an Article called Dreaming by Today’s Dreaming they talk about the two types of sleep. There is Synchronized or Non-Rapid Eye Movement sleep where there are little to no reports of dreaming. The second type of sleep is Desynchronized, dreaming or rapid eye movement sleep. This type of sleep causes your eyes to move rapidly, your autonomic nervous system to be activated, and for you to dream. The average person has five cycles of rapid eye movement sleep and dreams are had in intervals of about 90 minutes. What is interesting, is that a dream period usually lasts from 5 to 20 minutes (Dreaming). 2. In an article called Biology of Sleep by Marvin Rosen, he shows a study by Nathaniel Kleitman and Eugene Aserinksky at Stanford University in 1953 that proves that subjects are sleeping while in Rapid Eye movement sleep. They saw that after about an hour of sleep, the subjects eyes would move rapidly back and forth, and the subjects would awaken and tell them they were dreaming. Hence this stage of sleep being called rapid eye movement sleep. (Biology of Sleep) B. Coming from a Biology major I always find it interesting to learn what happens when we are awake and what parts of our brains are active, but it is even more interesting to see what is active when we are asleep and dreaming. 1. In Rosen’s article Biology of sleep he recognizes the parts of the brain that are used during Rapid eye movement sleep. He states, â€Å".. what we see when we dream are modifications of what we see when we are awake. Which suggests that the parts of your brain that are active when you’re awake, are also active when you are dreaming. It has been shown in tests that the visual cortex, the part of the brain responsible for vision, is firing during sleep. Presumably, this is why we have visual imagery in dreams. The only thing that seems to be different is that without being awake there is no perception of time which is why some dreams can seem to last hours, when in reality they are only lasting a few seconds. † (Biology of Sleep). a. In Rosen’s article he shows that not only is the auditory cortex used but the limbic system is also used. The limbic system lies at the innermost edge of the cerebral hemispheres. Part of the limbic system is the hippocampus, which is the key for storing memories. Without the hippocampus short term memories would be lost as if someone forgot to press save on a computer file. b. During Rapid eye movement sleep, certain cells in the brain stem produce a brain wave pattern called Theta Rhythm, which is is necessary for memory processing in the hippocampus. If the body is moving then Theta waves cannot be produced so the body is actually paralyzed when we sleep except for our eyes which do not interfere with Theta waves. When these waves are being produced during Raped Eye Movement sleep, memories are being reprocessed, which is why memories are the content of our dream. 2. The limbic system also includes the amygdala(Amig- Dalah) which is the part of the brain responsible for emotions. In an Article called Scientists Discover Why Dreams Are So Weird they state â€Å"During REM sleep, the mens brains showed the most activity in the limbic system, a primitive part of the brain that governs emotion. Meanwhile, little activity was seen in the frontal lobes. The frontal lobes help sort out and give meaning to information from the senses. According to the researchers, this unequal activity might explain why dreams can be so intense, yet so illogical. It may also explain why dreams do not seem strange to the dreamer while they are happening† (Scientists Discover Why Dreams Are So Weird). (Without your REM cycle, your limbic system including your hippocampus and amygdala and your visual and auditory cortex’s you wouldn’t be able to have a solid dream. ) TRANSITION: Now that we saw what functions in the brain during a dream we can better understand the significance behind why we dream. II. We must dream for some important reason, well what is that reason? A. There are many theories as to why we dream, however some theories more prevalent than others. 1. Sigmund Freud is a famous psychologist with many different theories about the brain, some of those theories pertain to dreaming. Freud’s theory is a good example behind why we dream and how it is important to our lives. He studied his own dream and his patients dreams and was convinced that dreams â€Å"were a valid method for uncovering repressed thoughts and feelings, disguising the latent content† (Rosen, Marvin). a. There are two things about dream content that was important to Freud. The dream events which he called â€Å"manifest content† and the true meaning of the symbol is â€Å"latent content. † Freud believed that the latent content would camouflage itself using symbols, metaphors, condensation of images, words that combine two or more meanings, and displacement of one image by another. (Rosen, Marvin) b. When Freud would analyze his dreams he found that many symbols were the same in different patients. For example, Kings and Queens stood for the subjects parents. However, he did not want people to think that these symbols always meant the same thing for everyone. Symbols always vary, depending on who is having the dream. (Rosen, Marvin). 2. Other psychologists believe that we dream to un-clutter the brain. They believe that during Rapid eye movement sleep it increases protein synthesis in the central nervous system for the development of memory and learning. ( Pollak, Charles P. , Michael J. Thorpy, and Jan Yager) Like I said before Theta waves are produced while in Rapid Eye movement sleep which is necessary for memories to be stored in the hippocampus. Dreaming occurs at the same time that Theta waves are being produced. In essence, we can assume that dreaming helps to store memories and to learn because they are happening at the same time. B. What do we need to dream? 1. We observed that dreaming could either be to release subconscious thoughts or to un-clutter the brain to help us remember things. But what if someone is blind? The same theories can still be applied, although someone is blind they will dream but they do not have images in their dreams like someone who can see. Instead they have auditory dreams, which is still included in helping to remember things. People who are were blind from a young age are said to still have images in their dreams. Their dreams are helping them remember what they used to be able to see. a. Scientists also did studies on sleeping patients where they would speak to them to see if what they said showed up in their dreams. They would splash water on them, and the would flash bright lights over their eyes. Less than 50% of all their tests showed up in their test subjects dreams. However, they realized that whatever the test subject sees, hears, and feels right before they are asleep they are more likely to dream about that. 2. Then there is emotion which is involved in our dreams. The emotion exhibited in our dreams depends on the gender, and personality of the subject. However, on average men are more likely to have more aggressive dreams that take part outside, while women have dream that are more passive and take part inside. (There is not a hard fact as to why dreams are significant, however they are highly educated guesses. Freud believes that most of the things in our dreams are symbols that metaphorically represent something in our real lives, while other scientists believe dreaming is getting rid of information in order to store new memories. ) TRANSITION: If Freud is correct in that what we see in our dreams has meaning to our lives, then we would be able to face our subconscious problems just by analyzing our dreams. III. How could we face our subconscious problems from reliving a dream? A. Both of these examples are from Rosen’s article â€Å"Theories of dreams and Application in Psychotherapy. † Studies done on patients and their dreams shows us how we can find meaning in our dreams and then fix the problem that it relates too in reality. 1. Freud did a study on a girl named Dora, she was 17 years old and she lived in Vienna. Doras family was wealthy. Her father, who owned a factory, had recently recovered from a serious illness. During this time, the family became friendly with another couple, Mr. and Mrs. K. Mrs. K had nursed Doras father during his illness, and he was very grateful to her. Mrs. K was very kind to Dora and sometimes gave her expensive gifts. Sometimes Dora stayed at their home. Dora related a dream to Freud. She had experienced the same dream four times: â€Å"A house was on fire. My father was standing beside my bed and woke me up. I dressed myself quickly. Mother wanted to stop and save her jewel case, but father said: I will not let myself and my two children be burnt for the sake of your jewel case. We hurried downstairs and as soon as I was outside, I woke up. † When questioned about the dream, Dora reported, Father was having a dispute with mother in the last few days, because she locks the dining room at night. My brothers room, you see, has no separate entrance, but can only be reached through the dining room. Father does not want my brother to be locked in like that at night. He says it will not do; something might happen in the night so that it might be necessary to leave the room. † Dora associated the figure of her father in the dream with an earlier incident, when she had been staying with Mr. and Mrs. K. She awakened one night to find Mr. K standing over her bed. The next night, she found a key and locked her room, but soon after, the key was missing. She believed that Mr. K had taken it and feared that Mr. K would again come into her room. She dressed herself quickly each morning. After several days, she demanded that her father take her home. Dora also recalled an earlier incident at age 14 when Mr. K had kissed her, leaving Dora with a feeling of disgust. Freud saw a connection between Doras statements that she woke up once she got out of the house in her dream. This was an expression of her thought that she would get no sleep until she is out of the house. Another important element in the dream was the jewel case. Dora related an incident in which her father had given her mother an expensive bracelet. Her mother had wanted something different and in anger told her husband to give it to someone else. Dora, who overheard the argument, and craved her fathers attention, would have accepted the bracelet with pleasure. Freud explained the dream to Dora in this way: . . . The meaning of the dream is now becoming clearer. You said to yourself, This man (Mr. K) is persecuting me; he wants to force his way into my room. . . . if anything happens, it will be Fathers fault. . . . For that reason, in the dream, you chose a situation that expresses the opposite—a danger from which your father is saving you. Freud believed that dreams express infantile wishes. In this case, Dora had strong feelings for her father and wanted to give him the love her mother withheld. The wish for her father was even more threatening to Dora than her fear of Mr. K and had to be kept unconscious. Dora was able to confront both Mr. and Mrs. K. Mr. K admitted his misconduct. Mrs. K admitted to having an affair with Doras father. Dora was vindicated. Her family severed relations with the Ks. Doras symptoms disappeared. She was later able to give up her infantile wishes for her father and to marry. (Rosen, Marvin) (I will be summarizing this, I am not going to state this word for word but this is an important example to why Freud’s theory might be correct. † 2. Although Dora’s case is severe this could be the case with many of you, I created a dream in the beginning of the speech referring to a fire that was burning down your room. You could ask yourself how to analyze this situation for yourself? If this was my dream, I could assume that what ever is in my room are stressors in my life and that I would like for them to all go away but I started crying because I know they are simultaneously important to me. But remember that each analyzation varies on who is having the dream is. B. Fritz Perls created the Gestalt theory which in a way is similar to Freud’s theory. He also saw meaning behind what we see in dreams but he believed that we could find the meaning by ourselves. 1. His theory suggests that his patients should act out their dream and they do not need anyone to tell them what it means. He believed if they acted it out for themselves they would better understand the roles of the symbols in their dreams. For example: A woman receiving gestalt therapy reported the following dream in the present tense: I have three monkeys in a cage—one big monkey and two little ones. I feel very attached to these monkeys, although they are creating a lot of chaos in a cage that is divided into three separate spaces. They are fighting with one another. The big monkey is fighting with the little monkey. They are getting out of the cage, and they are clinging onto me. I feel like pushing them away from me. I feel totally overwhelmed by the chaos that they are creating around me. I turn to my mother and tell her that I need help, that I can no longer handle these monkeys because they are driving me crazy. I feel very sad and very tired, and I feel discouraged. I am walking away from the cage thinking that I really love these monkeys, yet I will have to get rid of them. I am telling myself that I am like everyone else. I get pets, and then when things get rough I want to get rid of them. I am trying very hard to find a solution to keeping these monkeys and not allowing them to have such a terrific effect on me. Before I wake up from my dream, I am making the decision to put each monkey in a separate cage, and maybe that is the way to keep them. The therapist asked the client to become each of the parts of her dream, each monkey as well as the cage. She realized that the dream expressed a conflict she was having with her husband and her two children. She recognized that she both loved and resented her family. She needed to have a dialogue with her family and express her conflicting feelings. The family needed to learn to communicate better and try to improve their relationships. No interpretation by the therapist was necessary for the woman to reach these conclusions. (Rosen, Marvin) 2. If you act out each individual part of the dream you can figure out what each part of the dream means. (Whether you have a psychologists giving you the answers or you are acting the dream out yourself, you will be able to find a deeper meaning to most if not all of your dreams. ) CONCLUSION Dream interpretation is important because it allows us to see the historical values behind what a dream is, to find significance in our dreams, and to face our subconscious problems. We have learned that a dream is a natural part of our brains found in the limbic system, that the symbols in our dreams represent different things in our awakened state, and that there are ways to determine the meaning of what we dream about. There will only ever be theories as to why the human body exhibits dreams in the first place, however, they will always be important to figuring out who we are as people. Annotated Bibliography â€Å"Dreaming. † Todays Science. Infobase Learning, Web. 24 Oct. 2013. This is a short article written by a collaboration of people by a company named Today’s Science. Their main goal was to describe the pattern of sleep a human goes through during the night. This cycle is called NREM and REM, non-rapid eye movement and rapid eye movement. They mostly describe what happens during sleep because without sleeping you could not dream. Dreaming occurs during the rapid eye movement cycle of your sleep which is about 90 minutes into your sleeping cycle. Pollak, Charles P. , Michael J. Thorpy, and Jan Yager. dreams. Health Reference Center. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 24 Oct. 2013. These authors talked about dreams and how they lead up from history until recent times. They talked about dreams dating from the bible and how they were even important then. They talk about the sleep cycle and how it includes REM and without REM you could not have dreams. They also brought up different scientists theories in which they believed that dreams eliminate unwanted information from the central nervous system. Dreaming may be important in un-cluttering the brain so that new information can be more easily retained in memory. They talk about different types of dreaming such as lucid dreaming, nightmares and night terrors. They also talk a small amount about the sleep disorder narcolepsy. Rosen, Marvin. Biology of Sleep. Health Reference Center. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 24 Oct 2013. The author Marvin Rosen describes the brain like a computer. He starts off by comparing the human brain to a microchip and that no one actually thinks about what is happening inside the microchips when a computer is working. The same goes for our brains, and no one actually thinks about what is going on while we sleep or while we dream it just happens. He defines sleep, the R. E. M. cycles that happen during and he also talks about a brief history of the study of sleep and dreaming. He explains why we sleep, saying that it is a break time for the brain to review all the information during the wakened state. He also talks about why we dream and that is necessary because provide the brain with stimulation that is required to develop and preserve the brains nerve pathways. This theory is supported by the fact that infants, whose brains are rapidly developing, spend most of their time in REM sleep. Rosen, Marvin. Theories of dreams and application in psychotherapy. Health Reference Center. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 24 Oct. 2013. The author, Marvin Rosen, elaborately describes the sleep cycle in order for the reader to understand the concept of the Dream. He uses various examples from different psychologists including Sigmund Freud, Fritz Perls, and Carl Jung. Each of these men had a different standpoint on Dream analysis and the way the brain works to compute a dream. Freud believed that there was deeper, metaphorical meanings to the images and sounds in your dreams, Perls believed that there was also meaning except that dreams were basic enough for most everyone to understand the underlying meaning, and Jung believed that the images in dreams were passed down from generations through the nervous system. â€Å"Scientists Discover Why Dreams Are So Weird. † Todays Science. Infobase Learning, Mar. 1998. Web. 24 Oct. 2013. This article focuses on the emotions behind a dream. It says the the emotions you experience in the day you also experience in your dream because the limbic system is involved. The limbic system is the part of your brain that deals with emotions, and it is also the part of the brain that largely contributes to dreaming which is why your emotions pertain to your dreams. Other scientists in this article believe that dreams have no psychological significance and are merely the by product of our brains getting rid of excess information from our days.