Dreaming

"I have plenty of time to sleep when I'm dead" was an explanation a friend of mine gave me when I told him he should sleep more often. Most teenagers don't know how important sleep is to them and their lives. Getting a good sleep every night is necessary to live a successful and fulfilled life.

There are many theories on why we, as humans, actually sleep. One of these is that sleep evolved to conserve energy for organisms. As this theory states, sleep evolve millions of years ago in service of warm-bloodedness. Being warm-blooded requires the maintenance of a constant, high body temperature. This is just one hypothesis on why we sleep. Another would be that while we are sleeping, we are not moving. Due to not moving during this sleep, it reduces exposure to predators and other sources of danger. (Psychology Themes and Variations, pg. 137)

Many people don't think about how they sleep, they only know the do sleep. In all actuality, there are four stages in which we complete the task of sleeping. The first stage is a short transition stage that last for only one to seven minutes. During stage one, breathing and heart rate slows down as muscle tension and body temperature decline. Stages 2, 3 and 4 happen throughout the rest of the night at different times for each person. Toward the end of each stage, respiration rate, heart rate, muscle tension and body temperature continue to decline. As we start awakening toward the morning hours, all of these stages are reversed slowly until you are awake. (Psychology Themes and Variations, pg. 133-134)

When talking about sleep, you don't hear people saying something like, "Oh, my stage 3 was a little off last night, and I got worried and woke up screaming". The conversation might sound more familiar like this, "Oh! I had the weirdest dream last night! It started getting really scary and I woke up screaming!". The reason this sounds so familiar is because dreaming is what is most associated with sleeping.

Sigmund Freud was famous for analyzing clients' dreams in therapy. Freud believe that the principal purpose of dreams is wish fulfillment. This simply meant that whatever people wanted to accomplish in their awake life, but didn't, they would dream about at night while they slept. Although, this wasn't the only theory as to why we dream. Rosalind Cartwright proposed that dreams provide an opportunity to work through everyday problems. She felt as though the dreams were a way to help people figure out how to handle problems in their daily lives, and what they should do about those problems. (Psychology Themes and Variations, pg. 141)

Although most