DREAMS: A NEVER-ENDING RESEARCH

The Theories

 

The people behind these theories all tried to answer that question. But how realistic are these theories? 

 

• Aristotle and Plato

Aristotle and Plato, philosophers who lived around 300BC, formed their own theory. They said, that when we dream, we dream about things that aren't socially acceptable to be able to do them. Or, things that we always wanted to do but are impossible to. 

This all took place in an 'unreal setting', according to them. 

 

Validity: while a lot of dreams are strange in setting and what we do, some dreams are in a very real setting or something real happens. This makes this theory very general and not valid for all dreams.

 

 

• S. Freud

Sigmund Freud's theory is the most widely known theory of all in this list. He believed that dreams are wishes that we are looking to fulfill in our waking lives. These wishes could be innocent, but he argued that we also had a lot of violent and sexual wishes which our brain would cover up. He argued that by using psychoanalyzing, we could uncover these wishes our brain covered up. 

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Validity: this dream theory has been used for all of the dream dictionaries on the internet. It's been proven wrong by scientists, but as we don't know that much about dreams yet, it might also be right, who knows.. 

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• C.S. Jung

Carl Jung was a psychiatror who lived throughout the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. He believed that dreams reveal more about one than they conceal, and that they express our imagination. He also believed that dreams were the bridge between our conciousness and unconciousness, and that they worked to combine them.

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Validity: as the theory is very general, which means it has more chance to be right than other theories. The fact that he thinks it's the bridge between our concious and unconcious mind is hard to prove, and so part of his theory has a chance to be right. 

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• R. Cartwright

Rosalind Cartwright believes that dreams process memories and that you relive them sometimes in your dreams. She also believes dreams are a main factor in solving problems you might have in real life and that they mainly deal with emotions we are feeling. This would mean that dreams are essential for our emotional wellbeing as well as our mental health.

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Validity: the fact that dreams deal with emotions might be right, or solve problems. As when you wake up, you sometimes have a new idea about that one problem you still had to deal with. 

It has been scientifically proven that we process things we experienced in a day through dreams, which means that the part of processing memories is true, for the most part.

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• Side effect theory

This theory has been here for as long as dream theory has existed. It explains dreams as a phenomena which is a side effect of REM-sleep and the processing of information. 

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Validity: this theory could, of course, be true. However, the question that remains with this theory would be: why would we experience side effects every time? You would think that the brain would overcome this and find a solution for the side effects. 

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Signal theory

This theory explains dreams as physiological, which comes from physiology, the study of mechanisms and organisms and they reactions to things. The theory states that dreams are just trying to make sense of all of the random signals the brain gets while it is asleep.

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Validity: again, this could be true. But for the brain to make signals into images and movie-like for us, is a strange idea.