Bizarre Elements Of Dreams Essays - Dream, Rapid Eye Movement Sleep

Bizarre Elements Of Dreams BIZARRE ELEMENTS IN DREAMS, DAYDREAMS AND WAKING NARRATIVES Imogen Nightingale ABSTRACT In this Experiment, eighty-eight subjects were asked to individually recall and transcribe dreams and daydreams over a one-week period. It was also requested that they note anything prominent that had happened to them over that week. Results worksheets were the filled out and data was handed in for analysis. The hypothesis was to test Hobson & McCartley's activation-synthesis hypothesis that dreams would have more bizarreness than other waking narratives, Our results, however, failed to support this, instead showing a higher significance of bizarreness when daydreaming, and supporting the findings of Reinsel, Antrobus & Wollman. Scene shifts and transformations were also a focus of our study, results were in accordance with our hypothesis, however did not achieve statistical significance.GET BROOK TO LOOK AT THIS! A dream may be defined as a mental experience, occurring in sleep, which is characterised by hallucinoid imagery, predominantly visual and often vivid (Hobson Hobson McCarley, 1994, cited in W. Weiten, 1998). One explanation of bizarreness and disruptive discontinuities found in dream reports is provided by the activation-synthesis hypothesis (McCarthy & Hoffman, 1981 sited in Rittenhouse et al). This model (as seen below in Table 1) proposes that dream bizarreness is a psychological correlate of REM state physiology. The most important tenet of the activation-synthesis hypothesis is that during dreaming the activation brain generates its own information by a pontine brain stem neuronal mechanism (Hobson et al, 1977). This produces wide awake brain waves during REM sleep, creating what is known as a dream. Table 1. Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis Explained The ASH was challenged by Reinsel, Antrobus, & Wollman (1992)?further claimed that while REM sleep dreams are bizarre, they are no more so than reports of either NREM sleep mentation or waking fantasy. EXTEND Williams, Merritt, Rittenhouse, & Hobson supported the activation-synthesis hypothesis reporting that dreams are quantitatively different from waking fantasies (1992). They postulated that dream bizarreness is the direct cognitive correlate of aminergic demodulation of cortical networks in REM sleep. Their results indicate that dreams contain more bizarreness as well as other dreamy features than daydreams and waking fantasy (Williams et al, 1992). Dreams were found to be significantly more bizarre in incongruity and discontinuity, as well as uncertainty. Williams et al. concluded that due to the difference in neuronal activity of the brain between the two states, dreaming and fantasies are two totally different modes of information processing (1992). This is due to the difference in neuronal activity of the brain between the two states (Mamelak & Hobson, cited in Williams et al., 1992). Specifically, the brain is unable to adequately organise or record events in a dream (Williams et al., 1992). Mamelak & Hobson found that this would clearly contribute towards changes in thought or scene shifts during a dream (1989). Transformation in dreams and other narratives is considered in this study. Rittenhouse, Stickgold and Hobson, claimed that a dream object does not transform randomly into another object, but into an object that shares formal associative qualities with the first (1994). The purpose of this study is to assess the prediction based on the activation-synthesis hypothesis that there will be greater bizarreness in dreams than in daydreams or waking narratives. This has been supported by the work of Hobson, but challenged by others such as Reinsel, Antrobus, and Wollman. It was also planned to investigate the occurrence of transformations of persons or objects, following the work of Rittenhouse, Stickgold and Hobson. The variables being measured in this study are 'scene shift' (discontinuity of setting in place or time), 'entity change' (discontinuity of character, object or action), and 'discontinuity' (of thoughts or feelings of the dreamer or dream character). Followed by 'incongruity' (a mismatching of features of characters, objects, actions, thoughts or emotions with what is normal in waking life), and finally 'cognitive uncertainty (of thoughts, emotion or feelings or vagueness surrounding any element of the dream or narrative. METHOD Participants The participants were University of Tasmania KHA2112/312 students. There were 88 cases available to be samples, however 8 of these cases have been excluded