Chapter Text
↬Hobson (2000) describes in the following way what a dream is: “The mental activity that occurs in dreams is characterized by a vivid sensorimotor imagination that is experienced as if it were waking reality, despite cognitive characteristics such as the impossibility of time, place, people and actions; emotions, especially fear, joy, and anger, predominate over sadness, shame, and guilt and are sometimes strong enough to awaken the sleeper; memory, even very vivid ones, is dim and tends to fade rapidly after waking up unless special measures are taken to retain it”.
↬Stages of Sleep:
Within the dream different stages are distinguished that are identified by the existence or not of a rapid movement of the eyes REM (Rapid Eye Movement), which is visible under the eyelid to the observer.
In the stage no-REM/NREM (Not Rapid Eye Movement) which is also called slow sleep, there are also four stages (Bobes, Diaz y Bomper, 1999):
Stage 1: Transition from wakefulness to sleep, occupies about 5% of sleep time in healthy adults, the alpha waves that correspond to wakefulness in the EEG disappear and are replaced by slower waves (theta waves) typical of NREM sleep. A slow heartbeat also appears. During this phase, sleep is easily interrupted. This stage lasts a few minutes.
Stage 2: It appears after the first one and represents more than 50% of the sleep time. It is characterized by EEG waves with a higher frequency than theta. Muscle tone becomes somewhat weaker and the awakening threshold rises. It corresponds to the beginning of the dream itself.
Stages 3 y 4: They correspond to the deepest sleep because delta waves appear during them, which are very slow. Muscle tone is weak and heart and respiratory rates decrease. During them dreams occur, as well as episodes of night terror in the child and episodes of sleepwalking. Eye movements, if any, are slow.
Stage REM: High-amplitude slow waves are periodically replaced by rapid low-voltage EEG activity resembling alertness or wakefulness. Sleep occurs, the threshold for awakening is raised, and the area of emotions and visual association in the cortex is activated.
↬ Dream characteristics in REM:
▪They contain hallucinatory perceptions.
▪The images change quickly and are rare and bizarre, although they also refer to our daily lives.
▪They are so vivid that they sometimes make us wonder if we are asleep or awake.
▪Rational reflection in dreams is absent or greatly reduced, although reflection, self-control, and other metacognitive forms are now thought to be more common than used to believe.
▪Dreams lack stability in orientation, so places, times and people merge in an incongruous and discontinuous plastic way.
▪Dreams create stories to integrate all elements of the dream into a more logical narrative.
▪Dreams increase and intensify emotions, especially fear and anxiety, which seem to be integrated into the rarer characteristics of the dream and can even mark the narrative of the dream.
▪Dreams show an increased incorporation of instinctual programs, especially those related to fight or flight that can also act as organizers of cognition in the dream.
▪Voluntary control is very attenuated. The dreamer rarely considers the possibility of really controlling the flow of dream events and on the few occasions when this occurs, the dreamer can only gain insight and for a few seconds.
▪One of the reasons that REM dream descriptions are longer is that the rare images that compose it have to be explained.
↬ Concepts:
- Intense emotions, especially anxiety, glee, and anger are due to self-activation of the amygdala and other structures of the limbic system. The relevance of the dream images is due to the activation of the paralimbic cortex by the amygdala.
- We propose the hypothesis that what consolidates the dream is the attitude, understood as preparation to act (Bull, 1951), in which the action is inhibited, and when the action is inhibited, the emotional component appears, in the same sense that Frijda gives (1989) to emotions as preparations to act.