Men, women and children have different dream (EEG: electroencephalogram) patterns, settings and contents due to biological and social conditioning, where dreams reflect the updating of the progress in stages in their life and the motor behavior of “Light”, “Deep”, “ Good”, “Poor” sleep.
A stage of sleep characterized by more rapid breathing and heart rates, by bursts of rapid eye movement and by dreaming. Normally there are three to five R.E.M. periods per night, totaling about 90 minutes during an eight-hour sleep. The brain-waves patterns during periods of R.E.M. differ from those in other periods of sleep but bear some resemblance to the brain waves that occur during wakefulness. There is more movement of the body, more twitching, tossing, turning, sleepwalking, nightmares, night terrors, enuresis, screams, sobbing, mumbling, as well as observable signs of sexual activities (nocturnal emission of sperm, women’s wetness, sweating, shivers, etc) during R.E.M. than during other periods of sleep, yet the muscles of the face in R.E.M. are more relaxed.
Other related phenomena are evidenced, even when a person is ostensibly awake, such as hallucinating, trance behavior, delirium, drug reactions, drowsiness and differ from R.E.M. dreams in being less emotional, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, more transient, and less elaborate.
Dreams are, in a way, the recall of recent events ( day residues) and distorted reflections of our daily waking lives not necessarily symbolic pictures.
Recollection of dreams is reported to be more vivid when a person is awakened during R.E.M. (20 out of 27) than when roused during NON-R.E.M. sleep (4 out of 23). Persons may inaccurately recall in a process of elaboration and rationalization but often provide “the dream with a smooth facade, (or by omission) display rents and cracks” (Freud secondary revision)
Reports of morning dreams are typically more rich and complex than those collected early at night. Visual dreams are typically faithful to reality (representation) with little, if any, abstractionist or surrealistic dreaming. Any variations from the representational, in terms of fuzziness or simplification of imagery, are characterized as impressionistic.
A dream is a personal matter and an expression of the unconscious mind of the sleeper, which may seem in contradiction to the conscious mind. Dreaming may meet some fundamental physiological needs and reactions, such as hunger, overeating, exhausting, stress, being confined, hot, cold, sick, etc, and largely seems to express intrinsic activity, it can also be influenced by external stimuli and is likely to include experiences that symbolize such stimuli by being the result of a random R.E.M. remembering or the imagery that wells up during sleep, but not necessarily holding the latent or hidden significance that Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell & René Descartes respectively assigned them. Moreover, impulses one fails to manifest and satisfy when awake are often expressed in dreams with no strings or boundaries as sensory images, scenes or activities.
