Describe three different theories psychologists have proposed to explain dreaming

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

ANSWER:
One of the most controversial and best-known theories of dreaming is Sigmund Freud’s. In his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud called dreams “the royal road to the unconscious.” According to Freud, dreams allow us to express fears and sexual and aggressive desires without the censorship of our conscious thought processes. Having straightforward dreams about these “unacceptable” desires would cause us anxiety. Instead, we dream in symbols that represent our unconscious desires.
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The threat simulation theory (TST) suggests an evolutionary function of dreams. TST proposes that dreaming is essentially an ancient biological defense mechanism that allows us to experience potentially threatening situations so that we can rehearse our responses to these events. Although studies do show that childhood trauma or recurrent dreams are associated with a greater number of threatening dream events, not all of our dreams involve themes of survival.
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A biologically based theory is the activation-synthesis theory (Hobson & McCarley, 1977), which suggests that dreaming is just a consequence of the highly aroused brain during REM sleep, when the brain shows activation of millions of random neural impulses. The cortex of the brain attempts to create meaning out of these neural impulses by synthesizing them into familiar images or stories based on our stored memories. These images and stories may reflect our past, our emotions, our personal perspectives, and information accessed during waking.
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