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Rem Sleep Synthesis

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Sigmund Freud believed that dreams represented wishes in our unconscious mind, and if you were to analyze your dreams you could uncover your hidden desires. Freud split dreams into two parts the first being manifest content “the dream’s surface content, which contains dream symbols that disguise the dream’s true meaning.”(King 161) Latent content is the true meaning of the dream. Freud stated that “manifest consent expressed a wish in a disguised form. To get to the latent true meaning of a dream a person would have to analyze the dream images.”(King 161) Dr. David Maurice developed a concept called the activation hypothesis it states that the reason why humans experience REM sleep is to supply oxygen cornea of the eye. Maurice stated that without REM “our corneas would starve and suffocate while we are asleep with our eyes closed.”(Maurice) Maurice’s views on REM sleep contrast sharply with psychoanalytic view of the dreaming process sense “neuropsychiatrists tend to think of dreaming sleep as "physiologically determined" and shaped by the activation of brain neurons.”(Hobson) …show more content…
Hobson and McCarley wrote a paper describing the concept of "the activation-synthesis model of dream production". It explained that “The primary motivating force for dreaming is not psychological but physiological since the time of occurrence and duration of dreaming sleep are quite constant, suggesting a preprogrammed, neutrally determined genesis.”(Hobson and McCarley) Hobson believed dreams were your brain interpreting random stimuli created by the nervous system as sensory hallucinations. This is called the "The activation-synthesis hypothesis". Hobson’s stated that “the reason that dream content often seems disoriented or bizarre is because the activated brain-mind does its best to attribute meaning to the internally generated signals of the

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