In this video I describe three approaches for thinking about dreaming; a Freudian perspective, the activation-synthesis model, and information-processing theory. Freud emphasized the role of the unconscious and believed that dreams could be divided into manifest content and latent content, while Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley’s later activation-synthesis model viewed dreams as the result of random brain activation during sleep. An information-processing approach to understanding dreaming views REM (and dreaming) as a process for memory consolidation and integration, perhaps explaining why we frequently have dreams related to problems we’re working on and why sleep can actually help us to improve on recently learned tasks. We also see common themes in dreams which may relate to problems that we may all face, such as dealing with death, aging, embarrassment, or escaping a predator.

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Robert Stickgold’s TEDx talk on Sleep, Memory, & Dreams https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmRGN…

Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video I’m going to provide an introduction to three different theories of dreaming. It’s important to remember that these are going to be brief descriptions, so I’m simplifying these theories quite a bit. But I’m gonna go over sort of the main concept behind each of these theories and we’ll start with the Freudian approach to understanding dreams.

So Freud believed that dreams were representations of the contents of the unconscious. So you have these hidden wishes and fears and desires that are tucked away from the conscious mind because they produce anxiety and they somehow find their way out in our dreams. And so Freud believed that you could think about dreams as having two different types of content. They have the manifest content and this refers to what we actually dream about, what manifests itself in the dream. So the manifest content is what we dream the actual content and then we have the latent content and the latent content is sort of the hidden meaning behind the dream. It’s what’s causing that particular dream to happen.

So why is it that you’re dreaming about a train ride or something, and there’s some hidden message from your unconscious supposedly contained in that dream. So the latent content refers to the hidden meaning and so Freud believed that by working with a psychoanalyst a person could discover the contents of their unconscious by interpreting their dreams. By analyzing the manifest content they come up with what’s hidden away in their unconscious. What’s trying to reveal itself in these dreams.

Now there’s two main problems with Freud’s approach. The first of these problems is that sometimes we dream about things and it seems pretty direct. We don’t seem to have this intermediary step of latent content and hidden meaning. I mean we dream about things like desires and wishes and fears directly. We dream about sex and we dream about running from predators and in this case it doesn’t seem like there’s much hidden meaning. It seems pretty clear why it is we’re dreaming about the thing we’re dreaming about and so if that’s the case some of the time, well then then why would we need to have latent content in other dreams? Why would some dreams choose to show themselves directly in terms of their their meaning and others are sort of hidden away, need to be interpreted?

That’s one problem and the other problem is that the process of interpretation is naturally going to be subjective. So if you’re working with a therapist to try to figure out the meaning of your dream and you’re telling them all about the manifest content of your dreams, we might wonder how they’re able to come up with the correct interpretation or if there’s multiple correct interpretations. And the way that somebody decides that this is the meaning of your dream, that might reveal more about their mind then about your own. So the way that they interpret the manifest content might be revealing their unconscious rather than yours. So those are two main problems with Freud’s approach.

Now it’s sort of easy to be dismissive of Freud, as many people are, and many of Freud’s theories are sort of rejected as non-scientific. But Freud was onto something in that dreams do seem to have meaning to us and they do seem to relate to our desires and our fears. And we shouldn’t forget that when we think about why we dream or what our dreams mean. And in fact, the fact that people think that dreams have meaning gives them meaning. In other words, people think that their dreams have meaning and they dream about things and they may even change their behavior in response to those dreams. And if they do that, that means that dreams do actually have meaning. If dreams are influencing behavior then we should think about them pretty seriously in terms of their potential to have meaning. We shouldn’t think of them as just you know something to be dismissive of.

Ok, so this brings us to our next theory which was proposed in 1977 by Alan Hobson and Robert McCarley. This is called the Activation-Synthesis Model and so this is sort of a more scientific kind of dry brain-based approach for thinking about dreaming. So what Hobson and McCarley proposed was that there’s two main steps to the process of dreaming: activation and synthesis. Ok, so what does this mean? Well the activation that Hobson and McCarley were referring to is activation of different brain regions and different brain areas that, you know, occurs essentially randomly. There’s other processes happening during sleep and these just so happen to cause, you know, certain neural networks to be stimulated. And that’s why we have this random activation because of other processes that are occurring during sleep not because of the unconscious or anything like that. And then the second step is the synthesis. So Hobson and McCarley proposed that what happens is we try to make sense of this activation. So we have some some awareness of this activation of different brain regions, certain memories are being stimulated at the same time as others, and what we try to do is make up a storyline that makes sense of this. We try to explain why this is happening. So the synthesis is our interpretation of that random activation. And so this is meant to explain why dreams seem so bizarre. They’re very illogical and the idea is, well it’s just random patterns that are occurring. These are patterns that don’t occur during your normal waking life and so that’s why they don’t seem to make any sense.

Now this leaves a little bit of room for the possibility of meaning here and that how you choose to interpret the random activation of your brain might tell us a little bit of something about your mind. But there’s really a problem with this idea of the activation being random, so this brings us to our next theory which is known as Information-Processing Theory. So Information-Processing Theory says that dreams aren’t random. The activation that’s occurring is not a random process that just so happens to occur when you’re asleep. So information-processing theory suggests that well what’s actually happening is that you are going through a number of processes relating to memory and sort of making sense of your experience. And so this activation is not random and it’s serving particular purposes. So it’s doing things like memory consolidation and that this is what’s happening during REM and that’s when you dream.

And so this is responsible for the dreams that you have. It’s processes of memory consolidation, it’s this sifting through of your experience that I’ve mentioned in previous videos, the idea of finding the gist, right? Extracting the meaning of, you know, what happened to you rather than memorizing the facts. You sort of pull out “what does this mean for me? How should this inform my future?” and so another thing that might be happening is you’re stimulating certain new connections that you have because this is going to strengthen them. So the idea you might remember from memory on long-term potentiation, neurons that fire together wire together, the idea is well maybe if you repeat the stimulation of those during sleep, the the new thing that you’re learning, the new skill that you’ve been practicing, that’s going to be activated during sleep to help strengthen those connections. And another thing that might happen is that you may have maintenance of old connections. So you maintain other neural networks by stimulating them and so that would be why they’re being activated. That it’s not a random process it actually has a goal and it’s a directed process that’s meant to accomplish something.

Ok, so this information processing theory would help us to understand the occurrence of what’s called “day residue“. So the idea of day residue in our dreams is that if you work on a particular problem or you learn a particular task, you have a tendency to dream about it that night. This was demonstrated in a study by Robert Stickgold where we had participants play Tetris for several hours and then they go to sleep in the lab and then you wake them up and you find that they report dreaming about Tetris-like imagery because they spent so much time playing Tetris. And this happens even for people who have amnesia, and they don’t remember that they played Tetris all day. They still have it incorporated in their dreams. That says there’s something going on with their neural networks, there’s some consolidation process that’s occurring that causes that to happen.

Whereas if you, you know, watch a movie or something for a few hours you don’t tend to dream about it at night and that’s because you’re not working on solving this problem. You’re not trying to figure out the movie, whereas in Tetris you’re trying to get better at it, you’re trying to solve this problem and so that’s why you end up dreaming about it. And Stickgold has done a number of other interesting studies on this showing things that like, for instance, if you learn a task in the morning and then you’re tested on that night and you don’t sleep in between so you learn it twelve hours later you’re tested you tend not to be much better at night. But if you learn the process and you learn the task at night and then you sleep and then you tested 12 hours later the next morning, people tend to get better. They also tend to recognize patterns in the task that they were doing but they didn’t notice before and so this suggests that what we’re doing during REM sleep is we’re sort of sifting through we’re integrating this new experience with our memory and we’re sort of working on our problem-solving.

So I like to think of this as somebody using another type of consciousness to solve problems. So we have our waking consciousness that we can sort of work through problems but we also have this altered state of consciousness that occurs during sleep is dreaming and that that can be useful for solving problems as well. And this is demonstrated in, you know, famous examples like James Watson discovering the, you know, double helix structure of DNA and reporting that it came to him in a dream about a spiral staircase and so that might be an indication that part of what we’re doing during dreaming is working on problems, trying to solve them in preparing our future. Preparing for problems that we might face in the future and so this also explains not just this day residue which is very personal right and it’s gonna be specific to your own experience but also that there’s common themes in our dreams, right?

So you know dreams are personal as I said if you try telling someone about your dream or someone tells you about their dream, you find it, you know, it’s really not nearly as interesting as it seems to the dreamer. But there are common themes and there’s things that we all tend to dream about. We all have similar problems that we face; similar fears and similar worries and these show themselves in our dreams. So it’s quite common to dream about losing all your teeth or to have a dream about running from a predator. Well, if we think in evolutionary terms, I mean these are problems that you’re probably going to face. I mean in our evolutionary past you were definitely going to face one of those problems. Like either you’re going to have to deal with aging and decay or you’re gonna get eaten by a predator, like either way one of those problems is going to happen in your lifetime and you’re going to have to find a way to deal with it. And so the idea is that dreams allow us to simulate experiences and work out our potential responses to them.

Now when I say that dreams prepare you for the future I’m not suggesting that someday in the future you really are going to be taking a final exam for a class that you didn’t know you were in while you also realize that you aren’t wearing pants but you know the idea that we’re working out problems, we’re simulating possible futures and preparing ourselves to respond to them might be one possible role of what dreams accomplish.

Ok, I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!