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- MIAMI (Reuters Health) -
Where do we go when we dream? According to a leading expert on the subject,
the human brain is the real 'dream-weaver,' adding shape and color to the
stuff of daily life to create those magical, sometimes scary 'home movies'
in our heads.
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- ``They're the stories we tell ourselves, picture-stories,''
said Dr. G. William Domhoff of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
``I think dreaming is a form of thinking that's going on during sleep,''
he explained, ``but it's a pictorial form of thinking.''
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- Domhoff presented his findings at the annual meeting
of the American Psychological Society, held here earlier this month.
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- Psychology giants Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung dominated
dream theory for most of the previous century, holding that dreams represented
an expression of 'unconscious' fears and desires suppressed in waking life.
But decades of research by experts like Domhoff and others--including the
creation of 'dream banks' containing tens of thousands of individual dream-records--have
shed considerable doubt on those theories. ''For a long time, when I was
first involved in dream research we tested those theories--in the 1960s.
And we finally gave up on them,'' Domhoff told Reuters Health.
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- ``The parts of the brain that we use the most in waking
aren't used at all in dreaming,'' he noted.
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- Instead, research is now focusing on a 'neurocognitive'
theory of dreams, which holds that various parts of the brain work in concert
to turning emotionally-charged thought processes into dreams.
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- This process begins in the limbic region, deep in the
brain. This region is the seat of what Domhoff calls the ``emotional memory.''
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- ``In the emotional brain, it's very hard to process these
memories, to get a distance on them,'' he said. This may help explain why
close to 80% of dreams recorded in the researchers' dream banks focus on
fears and anxieties, often repeating familiar scenarios such as falling,
crossing collapsing bridges, or standing naked in front of friends.
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- Emotional memories stirring within the limbic system
require other neural partners before they can be turned into dreams, however.
These include the inferior parietal lobes (associated with spatial construction),
and the occipito-temporal area, associated with the visual imagination.
Together, these brain areas give shape and color to our sleep-time thoughts,
creating dreams.
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- The key role of the visual/spatial areas of the brain
in dream creation may be demonstrated by the fact that most children under
the age of 8 or 9 do not have frequent, vivid dreams, according to the
results of numerous studies. ``I think that there has to be a certain level
of cognitive maturation'' involved in the dreaming process, according to
Domhoff. In other words, dreaming--like drawing or storytelling--may rely
on areas of the brain that need time to develop and grow.
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- The California researcher stressed that neurochemical
activity within the brain appears to play a key role as well, helping to
explain why sleep does not necessarily always include dreaming.
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- Most dream experts now believe that dreams are simply
a continuance of normal, wake-time thought processes. Experiments in 'lucid
dreaming'--those surreal snippets we sometimes get as we drift off--seem
to indicate that we do not even need to achieve deep REM sleep to commence
dreaming.
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- ``So the idea is that dreaming occurs where there's a
certain minimum level of arousal of the brain, when there's no stimuli
forcing itself on us from outside, and we've in some way let go of self-control,''
Domhoff said. ``It may not even need sleep. It could be that just that
switch into drifting-into-sleep is enough.''
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- Dreams are an often elegant means of highlighting problems
faced in the present or the past, he explained. Domhoff gave the example
of a woman who periodically saw her ex-husband reappear in a rather frightening
dream. ``That whole experience of her marriage and her divorce lives on
in her as this terrible memory that periodically returns in this theme,''
he said. The memory was not 'repressed,' he noted, since the woman also
retained a clear, vivid memory of her marriage in her waking life. Still,
''dreams often deal with these unfinished kinds of businesses,'' he said,
so that ``sometimes we can be very happily remarried or involved with a
new partner, and yet we'll have dreams of the past partner in the upsetting
situation.''
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- ``If you took that dream to a (Freudian) clinician, they
would say, 'Ah ha! You have a hang-up about the past that you must work
on,''' the California researcher added. ``But there's another way to think
about it,'' Domhoff said. ``That this is (simply) a record of a past negativity.''
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