Kahl 1 Hannah Kahl Professor Presnell English 1103 28 October 2013 Evaluative Works Cited: How Dreams Affect

Our Reality Freud, Sigmund. The Method of Dream Interpretation. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: The Modern Library, 1950. Print.

In Sigmund Freuds book The Interpretation of Dreams, he has a chapter The Method of Dream Interpretation. In this chapter Freud focuses on the old methods of dream interpretation as well as his own. He believes that dreams are capable of interpretation and is a somatic process that makes itself known to the brain through symbols. There were two methods of dream interpretation in Freuds time. Method one was Symbolic Dreaming and method two was called the Cipher Method. Method one focuses on the overall symbol of the dream. The example that he uses in his book is the dream that Joseph in the bible placed upon Pharaoh. In this dream there were seven fat cows and seven lean ones. The seven lean ones then ate the seven fat ones. This was to symbolize that the seven year famine would consume the surplus of all the seven fruitful years that was produced. This shows the idea dreams are one giant symbol that are used to predict the future and what is to come, thus method one. Method two (The Cipher Method) treats dreams as if they are secret codes in which separate symbols create a key to unlock the dreams entire meaning. In this method the dream content is not the only thing that is considered, but instead personality and the social position of the dreamer are also taken into consideration. This method was thus created in order to decipher specifically complicated and confused dreams with a variety of possible meanings. Freud took both of these methods in consideration, however he became inspired by a statement that Joseph Breuer made. Freud was consumed with his statement and started to focus on dreams from his patients. He believed that a dream could be essentially followed backwards from the idea into the patients memory. He had his patients close their eyes and tell him everything that they thought no matter if they felt like it was insignificant or not. This was to try and recreate the state that you are in as you fall asleep, because that is when the undesired ideas emerge and then become desirable. The undesired ideas are the ones that Freud said evoked the most violent resistance which is why they come out in the form of dreams. He believed solely that you cant make dreams as a whole the main focus, but the individual components of its content. This book gave me a lot of useful information. Sigmund Freud was the first person to do anything with dreams and I have read that we have made little progress since. His theories on dreams directly validate some of my prior opinions and answered some of my questions themselves. I found what he said about the undesirable dreams becoming desirable very interesting. The fact that he said this helps answer the questions about if dreams help truly reflect our hopes, fears, and desires, and the answer is yeas. Reading what he had to say was very interesting and his book relates to all of my other sources, because his research was the result of their knowledge.

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Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 and died in 1939. He was educated at the University of Vienna, who became a neurologist. He later became a psychiatrist. While studying his patients and the way that they think he began to study dreams and their affects.

Kahl, Hannah. How do Dreams Affect Our Reality? University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2013.Web. 24 Oct. 2013. For one of my five sources I created a survey on surveymonkey.com with a series of questions that directly related to my topic. I asked the following questions: Do you wake up from dreams and still feel a part of the dream? Do dreams affect your mood? Example are you mad at someone for no reason, are you over emotional, or are you paranoid? Do dreams give you ideas that you execute? How often do you have reoccurring dreams? How long do you sleep a night? Do you feel like your nightmares reflect your true fears? Do your dreams help you realize aspects of your life that you may not have noticed before? And finally, Do you feel as if you can somewhat control your dreams? These are all questions that I created in order to find out how people perceive their dreams, and if they affect them personally, themselves. A majority of the statistics for this survey was that every question showed a majority of sometimes as an answer. For example two of the questions that received the highest answer as sometimes were, do you often wake up from dreams and still feel a part of the dream? And do your dreams help you realize aspects of your life you may not have noticed before? Both of these questions ranked 33 out of 64 said sometimes and that was roughly 50% for both questions as well. In addition, many people when reporting how much sleep they got a night, 76.56% said that they received 6-8 hours a sleep each night, which as I found out from the article Brain Basics that is still not enough for an adult. What I really like about this source is how I was able to directly ask all of my questions and get a general census of what people actually feel is going on, not science. It is different from all of my other sources because it is purely opinion, however, is very important because if people feel as if their dreams do not affect them, they may not. Although many people answered sometimes for most of the questions, most of the responses matched up with what my other articles have been saying. For example my question, do you feel like your nightmares reflect your true fears? This question was answered primarily as sometimes and rarely, however, in a few of my sources it has been shown that nightmares do reflect our true fears, like Sigmund Freud. He believed that mot only nightmares, but dreams reflect our true feelings and fears. As talked about by him in his book, Brain Basics also says how Sigmund Freud believes dreams to be safety valves in which lays our true unconscious desires. This source is credible, because it directly comes from the people. I created it myself and posted the link for surveymokey.com on my Facebook page to take it. I invited and encouraged people from all ages. I know for a fact that my grandpa, my mom, my sister, and a few of my high school friends all took it and they are a wide spread age group. I did this so that my survey would be more accurate so that it doesnt favor nor focuses on a particular age group. Surveymonkey.com is a website that many people use including researchers and college professors to create a way to collect direct data for their research. This is a reliable site to use and it provided a great way for me to collect direct and useful data for my paper.

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Mindell, J.A., and K.M. Barrett. Nightmares and Anxiety in Elementary-Aged Children: Is There a Relationship? Child: Care, Health, and Development 28. 4 (2002): 317-322. J. Murrey Atkins Library Search. Web. 19 Oct. 2013. This scholarly article focuses on if there is a relationship between nightmares in children and childrens anxiety. The study shows that nightmares occur more throughout childhood and start to decrease in likelihood around the age of 10. In older teens and adults, previous studies have shown signs of stress causing nightmares and in turn causing anxiety, but nothing of the sort has been studied of children. Sixty kindergarteners were given packets and asked questions of if they have had a nightmare before, how often they had nightmares, and how scary it was. Parents were asked similar questions about their children. Then the children did a test for trait anxiety from the State-Trait Inventory for Children. There were no differences between gender and age for any of the variables. Children who experienced more frequent nightmares were more likely to have anxiety. In addition, children who had described their dreams as being scarier than other children had described theirs, had higher levels of anxiety as well. However, there was some variation between the parents report and the childs report. Although the data shows that nightmares cause anxiety in children there are other factors to be considered like, the anxious children are naturally anxious and perceive their dreams to be scarier or the fact that children might be more anxious during the day which causes the nightmares. All in all the article states that there is a relationship between anxiety levels and nightmares in children. The interesting thing about this article is not only does it focus on nightmares and how they affect us, but it specifically focuses on children. The fact that nightmares can be so horrifying, so real, and so distressing that they cause anxiety in children and adults is precisely what I was looking for. This article talked about at one point how stress during the day can cause these awful nightmares which in turn causes the anxiety. This makes a lot of sense in my life, because I am a rather stressed person and I have nightmares quite frequently. What I found to be interesting was that the time of your life that nightmares occur the most are from the ages 6-10. I was quite surprised by this because I thought it would be a little higher, maybe until age 13 or 14. If nightmares are causing high levels of anxiety in children, it just shows that our dreams really do affect us and how we live even if we dont want them to. This is a credible source, because it is a thorough research paper that was published in the Child: Care, Health, and Development journal. This is an online journal through Wiley Online Library. Wiley is an international scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons. Wiley publishes over thousands of peer viewed articles and new books every year in print or online.

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Oudiette, Delphine, Samarada Leu, Michel Pottier, Marie-Annick Buzar, Agnes Brion, and Isabelle Amulf. United States. "National Center for Biotechnology Information". Dreamlike Mentations during Sleepwalking and Sleep Terrors in Adults. 2009. Web. 19 Oct. 2013. In this scholarly article, an experiment was conducted in order to figure out the mental content of dreams in relation to sleep terrors and sleepwalking. Sleepwalking and sleep terrors are caused from being disturbed during slow wave sleep (stage four of sleep: deep sleep) and have no recollection of acting out because of it. Forty three patients were videotaped and analyzed, as well as twenty five were a control group. These patients were then asked questions about their dreams such as if they could remember them, if they could only remember a scene, if they could remember the story line, and is there was any violence or mutilation that occurred in the dream. Specifics questions were asked regarding characters, emotions, sounds, and strange occurrences. The dreams were categorized based on how much the patient remembered, then the information was recorded. In addition no matter the dream or the patient, all patients in their dream acted as a befriender trying to save someone. Behaviors varied, but most were, of some range, physical. Not only did some of the patients sit up in their sleep and scream, they reported previous events that have occurred. For example one patient ran into the room his parents were at and threw a butter dish out of the window because he thought it was a bomb. These arousals not only affect the patient in an active and possibly violent way, but it also causes extreme drowsiness the next day. After completing the study it was shown that sleep arousal affects people with often night terrors and sleep walking four times more than the healthy control subjects. This article was very interesting to me. Stage four sleep is a stage of sleep that is most difficult to wake someone. This is when your brain waves slow down the most and there is no eye movement or muscle activity. Stage for of sleep is when bed wetting occurs in children and sleep walking and sleep terrors occur for just about anyone. Most of what I learned about stage four sleep came from my article Dream Basics, but this article conducted an experiment that relates to th at specific stage of sleep talked about in my other article. This article is highly significant to my research, because it is an example of how our dreams affect us. If someone have night terrors during stage four sleep and someone startles them or causes a disruption in their sleep, then many people act out their dreams which is extremely dangerous. In the article there was a story of a man who threw his wife on the ground and took his children outside. Another male ran to the room his parents were in and threw the butter dish outside the window for fear of it being a bomb. These stories helped me not only understand how dreams affect us, but how nightmares do and if they reflect our true fears. This source is credible, because it is a government document. This article was published by the NCBI. NCBI is a government department that Senator Claude Pepper saw a need for and created in 1988. The NCBI is a division of the National Library of Medicine which is a branch of the National Health Institute. The NCBI was created to create new technologies and to try to understand the nature of cells and molecular biology, specifically genetics.

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United States. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. National Institutes of Health. Brain Basics: Understanding Sleep.2007. Web. 19 Oct. 2013. This article talks about the basics of sleep which include, how sleep is active, how much sleep people need, how sleep benefits people, dreaming, an elaboration on REM sleep, circadian rhythms, sleep diseases, sleep disorders, and the future of sleep research and analysis. In the article the stages of sleep are discussed. There are five stages; stage one (light sleep), stage two (where most of our sleeping experience occurs), stage three and stage four (deep sleep), and lastly REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement sleep where most of our dreams occur). Different types of sleep affect the way that people dream such as in REM sleep is when bizarre dreams happen, and if disturbed can cause acting out the dream, therefore affecting the person and those around them. The amount of time people sleep is important as well. Teenagers need roughly nine hours, adults need about 7 to 8 hours, and infants need sixteen hours or more. These amounts vary on situation as well, such as a pregnant woman would need more sleep than if she was not pregnant. The amount of sleep also contributes to alertness during the day. The article says that if someone is drowsy during still or boring moments, then that person did not get enough sleep. This article also touches bases on what makes people tired (melatonin) and the system that bodies go through to know when to sleep and when not too. Humans dont just run on a 24 hour clock, they actually run on a 25 hour clock due to hormones and light exposure. Many sleep diseases and disorders come from this. Stroke and asthma attacks occur in the early mornings, because it directly relates to the endocrine system on which humans function. There are also many sleep disorders that have been discovered. For instance the most well-known sleep disorder, insomnia which affects over 60 million Americans. This disorder can be caused by stress, diet, and jet lag. It is where someone cannot sleep and is generally an underlying symptom of a larger medical disorder. In terms of the future researchers are realizing how active sleep really is and now they understand that in order to fully comprehend the brain, they must in turn understand sleep. This Article is my favorite article. It provides in detail description about each of the five stages of dreaming, and elaborates heavily on REM sleep. REM sleep seems to be motif of all of my sources. It is the basis of dreams simply because that is where most of our dreams occur. These are where our most fascinating and bizarre dreams happen, and they cause the most dispute about dreams and their meanings. One of my questions I wanted answered was what the stages of sleep. This article was very thorough with that topic and it helped me grasp a lot of what dreaming is all about. This article was more focused on sleep itself, but the parts that it talked about dreaming really helped. A couple of things that I am seeing in this article is a lot about REM sleep and it discusses certain disorders in the fourth stage of sleep that causes acting out your dreams. This is also the main focus of my other article on sleepwalking and night terrors. This is a credible source because its a government document that was published by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke which is a department that the U.S congress created in 1950. This is a department of the department of the National Institutes of Health. This department focuses on the brain and the nervous system disorders. They also focus on other things such as neurodegeneration, learning and memory, motor control, brain repair, and synapses. Their mission as a department is to reduce the burden of neurological disease that affect everyone and people s day to day lives.