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Key Components Of Sleep Research

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The average person sleeps around four months a year, begging the question why do humans dedicate such a large portion of our time asleep? One of the key components of sleep are dreams, many psychologists have attempted to figure out why dreams are beneficial to us, some of these theories include: Wish-fulfillment, problem solving, replay, and activation-synthesis. Through analyses of my dream, I will demonstrate that activation-synthesis is the most logical explanation as to why we dream. Sleep is crucial for the stability of one’s mind, body, and temper. When an individual enters a sleep deprivation they tend to have exhaustion, irritability, and an inability to focus that can only be remedied by several nights of healthy sleep. The healthy …show more content…

The reality is that one can only recall a dream shortly after waking up from REM sleep, therefor the only reason people do not remember their dreams is because they wake up in the wrong part of their sleep cycle. I apparently rarely wake up after REM sleep, because I am rarely able to recollect my dreams when I wake. Over the two-week period in which I recorded a dream journal I only able to recall four dreams. The dream I will analyze with the different theories started at a table where a couple of high school friends and I were sitting. We were all talking about our dates to the prom. When it got to be my turn, I announced that I was going with an elephant, my friends promptly told me that it was highly insensitive to refer to Edie, who was at the time my girlfriend, as an elephant. I tried to explain that I was not mocking her, I was literally brining an elephant as my date. The scene then cuts to the University of Michigan football stadium, where the dance was held. I dance a couple of dances with my elephant date, who oddly had no name. The dream then completely transitions to the elephant and I playing a game, and the elephant was beating me by a lot. I got upset and accused the elephant of cheating, because it has photographic memory, thus giving it an unfair …show more content…

The location and aesthetic of the prom was, to my recollection, the same as in my dream, suggesting that I only dreamed of going to prom was merely an adaptation of my previous memories. Further supporting this thought the friends I sat around the table with were actual friends I had in high school. Even though we never sat around a table and talked about our dates to prom, my brain could have just been scanning familiar faces and replaying them for me in a new context. Replay theory goes against wish-fulfillment theory by saying that the dream was meaningless. Despite the reasoning behind replay theory, it does not explain why we visualize and relive our memories each night. The Thalamus is constantly working at turning short-term memories into long-term memories, and yet we are not always thinking about the past. Furthermore, everyone has had especially weird dreams where nothing makes sense and everything seems strange and new. These dreams could not possibly from our memories, because nothing of the sorts has ever been previously

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