The Sleepless Mind

Term Paper Title	The Sleepless Mind
# of Words	909
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	3.64

The Sleepless Mind

Clifton Matthews
Dr. Linda Jones
Psychology 2301
March 31, 1999

     Matthews 1

"To a romantic, dreams are a way of beautifying life and embellishing reality, a way of being a hero rather than a villain, beautiful rather than ordinary, a saint rather than a devil, a wizard rather than a fool.  Dream thinking is magic thinking, which is one of  the characteristics of primary process thinking and feeling, of the unconscious id, and of the earliest stages in the birth of a dream"(Conigliaro 3)
     At the beginning of this century Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, developed the theory known as psychoanalytic theory.  Psychoanalytic theory meaning  the origin of personality lies in the balance between the id the ego and the superego. "Freud believed that, ". . .the dream hides not a divine message but a wish from the dreamers unconscious � a dream is formed when the unconscious wish seeks release in the dreamer's conscious mind"(Boxer 1).
Freud presumed that there were three levels of consciousness. The first level being the conscious mind, which Freud looked upon as the part of the mind that keeps us aware. The second level, the preconscious mind, pertains to that part of the mind that contained information that is not presently conscious, but with a little thinking can be easily brought about. This leads us to the third level, the unconscious mind.  This level

                                                       Matthews 2

pertained to the part of the mind that we are never fully aware of--like the pirate's buried treasure, or the monster beneath the bed, as the case may be.
The journal article, "Inside Our Sleeping Minds," was only partly about Freud.  Other aspects of the article contained information, more or less, about the biological side of dreaming.  In respects to this scientists today say that Freud really did not know what he was talking about. Scientific belief today supports the theory that the mind and the brain are two separate things, and indeed, need to be approached with a scientific view compared to the unscientific and unproven view collected by Freud. This belief totally contradicts the class book, because on pages (Lahey 400-401) it clearly states that, "Although Freud had devoted many years of study in Austria and France to the disorders of the brain and nerves, Freud found that what he had learned was of little help to his patients. Thus, being a person of considerable confidence and intelligence, Sigmund Freud set out to develop his own methods of treatment."
According to the article there are two types of dreaming-- thought like dreaming which there has been little study of and hallucinatory dreaming, the strange realistic sort that intrigued scientists for decades.  In the 1950's it was discovered that hallucinatory dreaming occurred when the heart and breathing rate increased and all body and limb muscles re...

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