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Weird dreams you've had
LTK:
I wasn't seperating the two. I'm saying that sleep serves to consolidate memory (among other things) and dreams are indicative of that process. Dreams are not the causal factor, and the fact that the dream-state is so far removed from regular, waking operation of the brain makes finding any hidden insight into aspects of your personality in them a fool's errand.
Carl-E:
The dream state is the deepest state in sleep, and doesn't last very long. There's some argument that the memory consolidation thingy goes on through all sleep, but we're just aware of it while dreaming (which I would think is why they seem to start out of nowhere), or whether it goes on only in the dream state.
The impression that we wake immediately from a dream is also (usually) false, it's very difficult to wake a dreamer because of the sleep-paralysis chemicals that prevent sleepwalking. Coming out of dream state can take several minutes (around 20, IIRC) and so what's happening is that we are already (imperfectly) remembering the dream as we wake up. It's the waking memory of the dream's climactic moments that make us sit up in bed suddenly...
and forget the rest of the dream.
Kenyahp:
Sleeps main goal is to replenish chemicals in the brain throughout the night and to let the body restore what we used up. Thats why it has to be dark in your room, because the chemicals replenish best in the dark. It doesn't do anything for the actual thoughts during the day, its main goal is purely biological.
Dreams, on the other hand, are what consolidate memory and thoughts, not actual sleep. They go hand-in-hand, though. I don't believe there is hidden insight in dreams. I do believe that they can make sense of things we couldn't during the day, however. But, the human psyche is so vast and mostly unknown, still, that how can someone say our dreams know something we don't at the forefront of our mind? For every study that says that dreams can't do that, there are a thousand saying they can. Its easier to prove something than disprove it.
The stage where you dream is REM sleep. Sleep is a cycle, starting at 1 and ending on the fourth part, called REM. The cycle takes about 40 minutes. Also, the idea that if you wake a sleepwalker they die is completely false. So totally not true at all. Every psych class I've ever taken has said this again and again.
I kinda wanna see the studies that went into this...
Redball:
--- Quote from: Kenyahp on 29 Mar 2012, 09:47 ---I do believe that they can make sense of things we couldn't during the day, however.
--- End quote ---
In the mid-1970s, I spent a year creating what became a neat kitchen out of a 9x20 screen porch. The initial enclosure required some skills I learned as I went and took about 10 days, two weekends surrounding a one-week vacation from work. Each night, I went to bed frustrated by a problem I'd been unable to solve. Each morning the solution was sitting in front of me. Since, the same with writing: I'll leave something mostly written at night. In the morning it's far easier to finish. None of this involves remembered dreams, just the appearance that some part of my brain continues to work on the problem.
LTK:
--- Quote from: Kenyahp on 29 Mar 2012, 09:47 ---Sleeps main goal is to replenish chemicals in the brain throughout the night and to let the body restore what we used up. Thats why it has to be dark in your room, because the chemicals replenish best in the dark. It doesn't do anything for the actual thoughts during the day, its main goal is purely biological.
--- End quote ---
Chemical replenish best in the dark...? Honestly, I have no idea where you got that from. Maybe you're confusing animal metabolism with that of plants. Replenishing energy reserves is indeed one of the hypothesised functions of sleep, but it doesn't have to be dark for that. Nocturnal animals sleep during the day, and they get by just fine.
--- Quote ---Dreams, on the other hand, are what consolidate memory and thoughts, not actual sleep. They go hand-in-hand, though. I don't believe there is hidden insight in dreams. I do believe that they can make sense of things we couldn't during the day, however. But, the human psyche is so vast and mostly unknown, still, that how can someone say our dreams know something we don't at the forefront of our mind? For every study that says that dreams can't do that, there are a thousand saying they can. Its easier to prove something than disprove it.
The stage where you dream is REM sleep. Sleep is a cycle, starting at 1 and ending on the fourth part, called REM. The cycle takes about 40 minutes. Also, the idea that if you wake a sleepwalker they die is completely false. So totally not true at all. Every psych class I've ever taken has said this again and again.
I kinda wanna see the studies that went into this...
--- End quote ---
You can't dream without sleep, and you can't sleep without dreams. We know that sleep consolidates memories from experiments, and we know that dreams happen in your sleep from personal experience, but the two are really hard to reconcile scientifically. It's intuitive to think that the two represent the same process, but proving this is another matter entirely.
It's been a long time since the human brain was universally considered a 'black box', and the functions that we consider 'vast and unknown' are becoming less and less numerous. Although I admit that sleep and dreams are still poorly understood, I still find it dubious that dreams themselves have some mysterious power that's unrelated to the memory processes that we see in other animals.
I think your information is a bit out of date. The common belief that REM sleep is the dream sleep stems from the fact that in a normal sleep cycle, you wake up from REM sleep, and thus the dreams you've had in that stage are the most vivid. But Idontunderstand is right; dreaming occurs in every stage of sleep. Wake someone up at any point during the night, and most of them will be able to tell you that they were dreaming.
No one said anything about sleepwalkers that die. But if you want to see studies I can look some up. You can also look at Wikipedia, Scholarpedia or search for articles in scholar.google.com. I bet there's a ton of sleep-related stuff out there that I don't know about either.
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