PSY 351 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Rapid Eye Movement Sleep, Waking Hours
Document Summary
What we dream about provides clues about what"s in our unconscious. Unconscious preoccupations - unresolved conflicts we struggle with beneath our awareness surface during sleeping hours. Investigators find the content of our dreams is not random. Evidence that dream content is often influenced by the fears, problems, and issues that capture our thoughts before we go to bed. Recurrent dream - experiencing a dream that we believe we have had before. Dream reappears night after night because the conflict expressed in the dream is important yet remains unresolved. More likely to suffer from anxiety during waking hours. People who are anxious about sexual matters often express their sexual through other outlets. Freud maintained that unconscious impulses cannot be suppressed forever. One of the major functions of dreams is to allow the symbolic expression of the impulses. Dreams provide a safe and healthy outlet for expression unconscious conflicts.
