Home >

Can people control the content of dreams

'

Dreams are one of the greatest mysteries in the field of biology. For many years. This wonderful physiological phenomenon has always been full of mystery. Not only ordinary people are confused and difficult to understand, but it is also full of doubts for scientists. However, in 1900, after the famous Austrian psychologist and psychiatrist Freud initiated the study of "dream science", scholars from all over the world began to formally explore the mechanism of dreaming from the aspects of psychology, physiology, and medicine. It can be said that everyone has had the experience of dreaming, and at the same time they will feel that the content of the dream is so incredible, there are often strange combinations, sudden scene changes, people can fly, fall, want to run but can’t move. The peculiar experience. Dreams seem to have no laws of cause and effect, nor are they limited by time and space. However, everything affects the dreamer's heartstrings. The experience is so real and the emotions are so strong. It doesn't feel absurd at the time of dreaming. So is there any connection between absurd dreams and real life? If there is a connection, can humans influence the content of dreams by controlling the conditions before and after sleep? A series of questions aroused the widespread interest of many scholars.

Two scholars, Dement and Walpert from the Kraitman Laboratory of the University of Chicago, were engaged in this research earlier. At first they noticed that most of the new subjects who had just arrived in the sleep laboratory often incorporated the novel environment of the sleep laboratory into their dream plots when narrating their dream stories. Obviously, changes in sleep conditions will be reflected in dreams. Dement and Walpert took inspiration from it and designed a series of interesting experiments. The method of the experiment is very simple, that is, to change the environmental conditions of the subjects during sleep to see if it will be reflected in the dream. The whole experiment was divided into three parts, first with cold water, followed by strong light, and then music. As a result, in the subjects’ dream reports, only 42% involved water, 23% talked about light, and 9% mentioned music. These data do not seem to explain the problem well.

In 1966, P·; Milli designed an overdose method experiment. He asked the subjects to do 6 hours of physical work before going to bed, but the experimental results showed that these people had no physical work in their dreams. Based on this, Haoli proposed the theory of "balance and complementarity". He believes that life and dreams in a waking state are balanced and complementary. For example, if you do a lot of physical work during the day, you certainly don't want to do it in a dream.

However, it didn't take long for the theory of "balance and complementarity" to run into trouble. In 1968, physiologist Tao Bo made an experiment that could not be explained by the theory of "balance and complementarity". Tauber asked the subjects to wear rose-colored glasses for two consecutive weeks. As a result, all the scenery in their dreams turned into rose-colored, which clearly showed that the conscious perception during the waking state continued into the dream. However, according to the theory of "balance and complementarity", the scenery in dreams should be complementary or colorless, which is not the case.

Many of the above experimental results have caused scholars to make the same many and very different explanations, but one thing seems to have become clear, that is, when the waking environment encounters certain special changes, it will increase in the dream mirror. New content related to this. However, the focus of the current problem is how to accurately grasp the inevitable connection between environmental stimuli and dream content. Only by doing this can the vision of controlling dreams be achieved.

Psychoanalytic theory believes that the role of dream lies in the psychological aspect. Dreaming is to satisfy the desire. As long as the desire is satisfied when waking, this aspect of the content will not appear in the dream. In 1974. Dement carefully selected a subject for the experiment. The subject’s strong desire at the time was to eat banana cream pie. When he was about to enter the dreaming stage of sleep (rapid eye movement sleep period), he was awakened three times and he was given a piece of pie each time. . When he was awakened for the fourth time, he said, “I’m drinking coffee and smoking (he usually drinks coffee and smoking after eating).” At the fifth call, he said, “Give me a plate of noodles on the table. Article, I dumped it in the trash can.” He awakened him for the sixth time and said, “Dr. Dement, I dreamed that I was feeding you pie.” The results of this experiment showed that the pie is satisfied. Wish cannot stop dreaming, but the theme of dream will become reluctance to eat anymore.

Later, two American scientists, Witkin and Lewis, used the method of stimulating the real environment to measure the content of dreams. The stimulus they used was four movies, one was the process of pregnant women giving birth; the other was the foreskin of the male juvenile penis cut by the primitive tribesmen with sharp stone pieces; the other was the female monkey tearing up the dead monkey and eating it The past; another is a plain landscape film. Results According to the subject’s report, the contents of the first three films were mostly programmed into dreams, while the plain landscape films were not at all. The above experiment seems to illustrate the problem. The external stimuli received in real life are relatively strong, and those stimuli are more likely to appear in dreams. This statement has been approved by many scholars.

Regarding the question of whether people can control the content of dreams, the only answer that can be made so far is only; external stimuli before and after falling asleep seem to be programmed into dreams. However, it is difficult to standardize the various physiological mechanisms related to this and its regularity due to too many changing factors. Scholars who are engaged in research in this field feel that experiments to influence dream content by controlling the conditions before and after falling asleep are very complicated and difficult. This is as the American psychologist Cartwright said: "If you have a dry mouth before going to bed, some people will dream of the ocean, some will dream of the desert, and some will dream of something that no one can understand, but it is related to dry mouth. A certain emotional state of connection.” Therefore, we first need to have a more accurate method of measuring the content of dreams, and then we can understand the meaning of dreams, and finally achieve the purpose of controlling dreams.