Hannah Kahl Professor Presnell English 1103 3 November 2013 How Dreams Affect Our Reality Every night

people wake up in the dead of night from crazy dreams. People wake up in a cold sweat, crying, and paranoid. They became a part of it, felt it, saw it, and experienced it. Images of lovers, killers, friends, and family members correlate in your mind and make you a part of the experience. Dreams have caused people to wake up in a panic and question life, but have you ever wondered if they affect how we live? Why was I Curious? Ive always been curious about if dreams really affected who we are or how we live. Ever since I was a child I have had vivid dreams. When I was little I had one dream that I have had almost every year since I was in about the third grade. It was about my cousin and I. We would go on this adventure and find an amazing rock waterslide in the middle of this fairytale wilderness. When we reached the end we would find a mermaid with sparkling fins of blue and green and try to rescue her. So we set out on a mission; we met many mystical friends one being a princess and another a giant. The princess was trying to get out of a bad relationship and be with her prince. A war breaks out in the forest and many creatures from the kingdom are lost in battle. In the end we all end up living in her huge tree mansion with all the people who helped her find love. This dream was always of particular interest to me, because the cousin who was in

the dream was a cousin who was brutally mean to me growing up. I started to think as I got older, and I kept having this same dream, that maybe it was myself longing for her love and a relationship with her. I found that now we have a better relationship that dream has stopped. Dreams have always been powerful in my life, so I decided to pursue how or if dreams affect us as humans and our lives. How it My Research Began When I began my research it was quite difficult starting out. I looked in databases through my school library, I searched google scholar, looked on government websites, and dug for information in books, but everything I found seemed to be irrelevant. I noticed by using the word dream in searches, my results were about aspirations, hopes, and desires. If I used the word reality with the word dream, my results would give me sources about physiological disorders and sleep diseases. I soon started to realize that I would have to use synonyms for the word reality. I began to search things like, dreams and behavior, dreams and affects, and dreams and sleep. These searches provided a more focused and credible type of source. I quickly found an abundance of sources on my questions. I wanted to know if recurrent dreams meant something, if nightmares reflected our true fears, if dreams affect how we think or feel, what the different stages of sleep were, if the amount of sleep we get a night affects our dreams, and what the symbols of dreams were. I shortly concurred that there were a few key words that I needed to know before I fully understand what I was reading in my articles. One of the words that popped up the most in all of the sources was REM sleep. And all of my sources intensely focused on the different stages of sleep, how they relate to our dreams, and our lives as a whole.

The 5 Stages of Sleep The National Institute of Neurological Disorder and Stroke classifies and describes five stages of sleep that include stage one, two, three, four and REM sleep. Stage one is what is called light sleep (United States). This is the stage where we drift in and out of sleep and can be awakened easily; our eyes move very slowly and muscle activity slows. A lot of times when people wake from stage one sleep they remember fragments of their dream as if it was more of a daydream. Interestingly I have had many experiences with the feeling of falling in a dream where I have jerked up in my sleep or jumped and I was awoken. I learned from reading this article that the feeling people get as if they are falling is because of sudden muscle contractions called hypnic myoclonia which occurs during sleep stage one. I was confused because I have woken up in the dead of night with that same feeling of falling, and light sleep was said to be the first stage, but our sleep cycles apparently start from stage one and end in REM sleep, but then it starts over. So you could be potentially asleep for four hours and be in light sleep (stage one). Stage two is one of the most important stages of sleep, because we spend about fifty percent of our time asleep in stage two sleep. In stage two sleep our eye movements stop and our brainwavesbecome slower with occasional bursts of rapid waves called sleep spindles. In stage three sleep brain waves become extremely slow. These slow brain waves are called delta waves and by stage four that is all the brain produces. In stage four there is no eye movement or muscle activity. It is very difficult to awake someone during stage four sleep as well as stage three sleep, together they are considered the deep sleep stages. Stage four sleep is also the stage where on most young children bedwetting and horrible nightmares occur, and even sleep walking.

REM sleep: What it is and what it does REM sleep stands for Rapid Eye Movement sleep. Many things occur when our bodies experience this. How the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke describe it, REM sleep is a stage of sleep where our bodys breathing speeds up and becomes shallow, heart rate and blood pressure rises, our eyes jerk around rapidly in our skull, and our bodys muscles become temporarily paralyzed. Humans spend roughly twenty percent of their time dreaming in REM sleep and is when the most bizarre and illogical dreams occur. This makes a lot of since, because many people when referring to dreams recall peculiar events and confusing details. REM sleep begins precisely after seventy to ninety minutes after falling asleep, and each cycle of REM sleep is completed in a course of ninety to one hundred minutes in which increases in length as sleep progresses. REM sleep is fatal in our sleep experience. Signals are given to different parts of the brain starting from the base of the brain, moving to the thalamus, and ending the cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex is ultimately where REM sleep takes place; this part of the brain is vital for learning, thinking and organizing information. It had been discovered that because of this babies need REM sleep more than grown adults who spend twenty percent of their time in REM sleep, and is actually crucial to development. Because of that reason infants, by contrast, spend about half of their sleep time in REM sleep. Not only is REM sleep important for intellectual development, it also the explanation for many violent acts during sleep. REM sleep is a very sensitive time of sleep. If anyone is disturbed during this particular stage people often begin to act out their dreams. This causes sleep walking problems and violence during sleep.

Nightmares and their Affects In two different studies nightmares were studied. In an article from Child: Care, Health and Development, J.A. Mindell and K. M. Barrett did a study to determine whether a relationship exists between childrens anxiety level and nightmare occurrence. This has never been studied amongst children before, however there have been studies completed on nightmares and levels of anxiety in adults, college students, and high school students. Those studies showed that stress caused nightmares and in turn nightmares caused anxiety. I have always struggled with nightmares a long with extreme amounts of stress; this explains and helps me understand how and why my brain is processing things the way it is. REM sleep is where most nightmares occur and because most nightmares occur from the age of six to ten; it is for that reason J. A. Mindell and K. M. Barrett wanted to specifically study the correlation of nightmares to the effects of anxiety. Sixty elementary children and their parents were the given surveys to complete on the nightmares of the child. The child and parents would be asked the same questions, but the parents were asked to not influence the childs responses. The children were asked if they ever had nightmare, how often they had nightmares, and the intensity of the nightmares. The same questions were asked for the parents about their children. Then the parents were asked to complete a State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children. It was shown that children who experienced nightmares have significantly higher levels of anxiety than children who do not experience nightmares. In addition to children who rated their nightmares as very scary had significantly higher levels of anxiety than children who rated their nightmares as a little scary. Another study was conducted by Delphine Oudiette and her team on sleep terrors and sleepwalking through the NCBI. Sleep terrors and sleepwalking are described as arousals from slow wave sleep with no or poor mental recollection (224). The National Institute of

Neurological Disorder and Stroke defines slow wave sleep as stage three and four sleep where brain waves slow and there is no eye or muscle movement. These stages of sleep are referred as deep sleep and are very difficult to wake people during. Oudiette and her team touch on how sleepwalking is also caused by a REM sleep disorder called RBD where nocturnal epilepsy, sleep sex, and sleep-related eating disorders occur (226). Forty-three patients were studied during sleep for their sleep walking patterns and the events that occurred (224). As a control group twenty-five people were also studied during sleep under the same conditions. The sleepwalking events or reactions during sleep occurred during the first 2 hours of sleep in 88% of the patients (228), which ironically is when REM sleep begins to occur and completes its first cycle (United States). When there was a single event per night in 55% and more than 1 event per night in 45%. The precipitating factors were alcohol intake in 14%, sleep deprivation in 28%, stress or argument in 58%... (228). In one of the studied sleep events a girl was observed in the video of her getting up from bed, opening her eyes, and screaming (230). It was reported that she has had similar events at home, she had the vision of being locked in a box and suffocating or being attacked by something or somebody unknown. Like this patient, other patients who have these experiences also have reported more severe cases of sleepiness during the day and interferes with daily functions. It is interesting how certain types of dreams can cause acting out in extreme ways. These events can affect their well-being as far as being able to function properly during the day, it can affect people around them and their safety, and it could also cause anxiousness. In one analysis, when Oudiette and her team asked the patients questions about previous dreams, a father reported a time he took his infant daughter out of her crib, took her to the attic, and tied her up (231). This does not only affect the person with sleepwalking, but also those around them.

What the Past said about Dreams Sigmund Freud, one of the most well-known physiatrists of all time, graduated from the University of Vienna to become a neurologist, but later began his practice as a physiatrist. He soon became fascinated with dreams and began to study his patients dreams to see if they had any effects on their lives. The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke credited Freud as someone who greatly influenced the field of psychology, and believed dreaming was a safety valve for unconscious desires. It seems as if Freud was right. In fact we havent made much more progress with understanding dreams since Freuds time. In Freuds book The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud talks about in chapter one (The Method of Dream Interpretation) about two different methods of dream interpretation. The first method is called Symbolic Dreaming and the second method is called the Cipher method. Method one focuses on the entire dream as a whole being a symbol that has one cohesive meaning. It is the idea that the dream concerns itself chiefly with the future As an example of this Freud uses is the dream that Joseph in the bible placed upon Pharaoh. In this dream there were seven fat cows and seven lean ones. The seven lean ones then ate the seven fat ones. This was to symbolize that the seven year famine would consume the surplus of all the seven fruitful years that was produced. This shows the idea dreams are one giant symbol that are used to predict the future and what is to come. The Cipher method is the opposite. This method treats the dream as a kind of secret code in which every sign is translated into another sign of known meaning, according for an established key.

Freud became interested in dreams while he learned about these two methods, but was truly inspired by his colleague Joseph Breuers words Where it has been possible to trace a pathological idea back to its origin, this idea has crumbled away, and the patient has been reliever of it. From this concept Freud changed history. He began to study his patients dreams in order to follow their dreams correlation to their problem. He would try to get his patients into a state where he instructed them to let go of his surroundings and to tell him everything they think of, it is important that he must not allow himself to suppress one idea because it seems to be unimportant or irrelevant to the subject This is to recreate the dream state that peoples minds are in right before falling asleep. He would recorded these ideas down and then after a patient has a dream he recorded their dream and realized that the dreams had symbols that could be directly connected to previous thoughts while awake. This was groundbreaking in dream research and not much progress has been made since. What People Think about Dreaming I conducted a survey on surveymonkey.com with a group of sixty-four people on their opinions about dreaming and the affects their dreams or sleep might have on their lives. I made sure to get a variety of people to take my survey, so many of them were from a variety of age and from both sexes. I asked a serious of questions that included; do you wake up from dreams and still feel a part of the dream? Do dreams affect your mood? Example are you mad at someone for no reason, are you over emotional, or are you paranoid? Do dreams give you ideas that you execute? How often do you have reoccurring dreams? How long do you sleep a night? Do you feel like your nightmares reflect your true fears? Do your dreams help you realize aspects of your life that you may not have noticed before, and finally, Do you feel as if you can somewhat control your dreams? These questions mainly had a response with a majority of sometimes. The

responses I got for the question Do dreams affect your mood? had forty eight percent say sometimes and twenty-three people said rarely. For the question Do you feel like your nightmares reflect your true fears? twenty percent said often, forty-five percent said sometimes, twenty-five said rarely, and only nine percent answered never. What was interesting to me is that for my question referring to the amount of sleep people received a night, an overwhelming amount of people said that they did get six to eight hours of sleep. Not only was I surprised by this data, I also wondered if there was a correlation between the amount of sleep people got and how people felt about their nightmares; if REM sleep is where people spend most of their night dreaming in, and thats where nightmares occur, would it not affect how many nightmares we have based on the amount of time we sleep if the amount of REM sleep we get increases the longer we are asleep? It seems that based on the data there could be a relationship, but I would need to collect more data on the particular subject with a bigger group of people. In addition, the data that I retrieved from my last question was really intriguing. Seventy-eight people said they felt as if they could not control their dreams, whereas twenty-one percent felt as if they could. From the research that I found it seems that dreams are a physiological way of putting together your feelings and thoughts, so the dreams are out of our control as humans. The survey contributed real life concepts and data to help connect my concepts and I felt as if it was really helpful to see the gap between facts from scholars and perceptions from daily people. The Nation al Institute of Disorders and Stroke says researchers now know that sleep is an active and dynamic state that greatly influences our waking hours, and they realize that we must understand sleep to fully understand the brain. Our dreams are what makes our minds function and consumes the most content in our minds. Emotions emerge from the depths of our souls into our dreams. They show us who we are and just exactly how we think. Not enough

people take their dreams seriously. There are cures to many of our mental aliments and distresses that can be found in our thoughts while asleep. Dreams say something about us; they are our own realities being played out in our minds. . If someone keeps having nightmares, it is obviously deeper than a synthetic world created in their mind. They help us function and dictate our lives. Dreams are a physiological thing that is rushing in our minds, and its going to keep pushing itself in our minds until it makes itself heard.

Physocological thing going on and its going to keep pushing in your mind until its heard and comes out. They affect how we function.

Pay attention to your dream they say something about you Dreams are our own relaities being played out in our head. Researchers now know that sleep is an active and dynamic state that greatly influences our waking hours, and they realize that we must understand sleep to fully understand the brain NINDS

Works Cited Freud, Sigmund. The Method of Dream Interpretation. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: The Modern Library, 1950. Print. Kahl, Hannah. How do Dreams Affect Our Reality? University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2013.Web. 24 Oct. 2013. Mindell, J.A., and K.M. Barrett. Nightmares and Anxiety in Elementary-Aged Children: Is There a Relationship? Child: Care, Health, and Development 28. 4 (2002): 317-322. J. Murrey Atkins Library Search. Web. 19 Oct. 2013. Oudiette, Delphine, Samarada Leu, Michel Pottier, Marie-Annick Buzar, Agnes Brion, and Isabelle Amulf. United States. "National Center for Biotechnology Information". Dreamlike Mentations during Sleepwalking and Sleep Terrors in Adults. 2009. Web. 19 Oct. 2013. United States. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. National Institutes of Health. Brain Basics: Understanding Sleep.2007. Web. 19 Oct. 2013.