- [Voiceover] Let's look at our gentleman in the middle.
He is lying down and he is dreaming.
That raises the question, do our dreams have a meaning?
So if he's thinking about money, relationships, even
weird and wonderful things like monsters
chasing him down the road, what does that mean?
Where are all these dreams coming from?
Now, along came Sigmund Freud,
a prominent neurologist and psychoanalyst,
and what Freud said in his theory of dreams
is that dreams really represent our unconscious wishes,
urges and feelings.
That dreams are a way of understanding
things that are typically hidden.
Now how do we understand that?
Well, let's take this iceberg, and let's say that the bit
of the iceberg above the water
represents conscious wishes, urges, feelings
and these are the things we actually know about
and that we experience and that we
consciously are aware of.
But what you can see here underneath the water,
there's plenty more iceberg.
And that actually represents, the unconscious.
Our unconscious wishes, urges and feelings.
And it's these unconscious elements that
come out in our dreams.
Now Freud actually went a little bit further and said
we can break down dreams into two key components.
The first one being, what is actually happening
in our dreams.
And this is actually referred to as the
Manifest Content.
So, if you dream of monsters chasing you,
the manifest content is very much, monsters
chasing you.
The second part of Freud breaking down dreams
is what is the hidden meaning behind a dream?
And this is something that he termed, Latent Content.
So the monsters chasing you, does that refer to you,
being potentially chased out of your job
or feeling insecure in your job because other
people are getting a promotion?
What is the hidden meaning?
That's how he broke down dreams.
Into the manifest and latent content.
So, according to Freud, dreams very much
have a meaning on our lives.
Dreams and the interpretation of dreams,
trying to understand what the dreams mean,
can really help us to identify and resolve conflict.
Now, on the flip side of this,
I've got this picture of this brain here.
And one the things that was also hypothesized
to happen, is that in the brain, we get a lot of
electrical impulses,
neurons firing in this area
called the brain stem.
And these electrical impulses are sometimes
interpreted by the "thinking"
part of the brain, the frontal part of the brain.
That may try to understand or make sense of all
these kind of random impulses that keep firing
and keep occurring during this period of REM sleep
And REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement sleep.
It's the time or part of sleep that our eyes are rapidly
moving and we experience dreaming.
So during REM sleep, we get these brain circuits,
this brain activity in the brain stem.
And then the cerebral cortex and frontal part
of the brain, has to interpret that and make
sense of that.
So we can turn the brain stem activity as being
activation, and the cerebral cortex trying to understand
what's happening as being, as trying to synthesize
meaning, and this is very much a hypothesis,
and if we put all of those together, we get the
activation, synthesis hypothesis.
Which is what this is really called.
And what I mentioned is that dreams are simply
our brain is trying to find meaning in these random
signals from the brain stem.
So really, the dreams may not have
any prominent meaning.
So this is very much a way that we can split up
these two key theories.
On one side,
Freud feels that dreams indeed
have a meaning and important to helping us to
resolve hidden conflicts and understand
unconcious feelings, desires, impulses,
and that's his theory of dreams.
On the other hand,
we have this activation synthesis hypothesis.
that suggest that dreams are simply a part of
our brain, the frontal part of the cerebral
cortex, that more generalized thinking part of
our brain, trying to make sense of these electrical
impulses in the brain stem.
So two, really contrasting ideas
about the importance of dreams.
There are some other theories, these are just
two of them, but two of the more important
ones that you should be aware of.