An Analysis of the Role of Dreams in Psychology

All people dream at night whether we want to or not. Dreams are basically a series of visual pictures that go through our heads. “A dream is like a movie that plays within our minds(www.suite 101.com).” Research shows that everyone dreams every night even though we don’t always remember them in the morning. Some people remember their dreams very easily, and some don’t. Sometimes, the things we do after waking up in the morning may affect whether we remember our dreams or not.

Different psychological perspectives have different views on what dreams mean.

The psychoanalytic perspective suggests that dreams express unconscious wishes or desires. Sigmund Freud was a theorist from this perspective. “He posited that dreams could be analyzed on two levels: the manifest content and the latent content”(www.suite101.com). These two parts are basically what you remember about your dream or what you tell people about it, and the deeper meaning to the dream.

The latent content is the unconscious part of the dream or the part that the person dreaming is unaware of. So, the manifest part of your dream is a clue to the latent part.

“From the Cognitive Perspective, dreams help us to solve problems, work with information and think”(www.suite 101.com). The Cognitive perspective is about understanding our dreams in order to understand our behavior. Cognitive perspective theorists believe that we dream about everything that happened in our day. When we dream, we are really processing information, meaning we are sorting through our memories we gathered throughout the day.

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Biological perspective psychologists believe that dreams happen in a stage while we are sleeping that is known as REM sleep. REM stands for rapid eye movement. During the REM stage, we are in a very deep sleep when we dream but our brains are very active. “The brain tries to make sense of the random activity, and creates a dream”(www.suite101.com). The biological approach explains why our dreams are very confusing and don’t always make sense because it says that during the REM stage, the brain is trying to make sense of random activity. However, this theory doesn’t explain why we have reoccurring dreams.

Even though we really don’t completely know why dreams occur, I think it is important for us to have some understanding of why we dream. I think that all three perspectives have valid points and clearly demonstrate why dreams occur. I am not really all for one of the perspectives however, I believe that together the psychoanalytic, cognitive, and biological perspective answer the question, why do dreams occur?