Stop Dreaming Your Life Away Trivia Quiz

Answer: False

Although vivid dreams (those involving intense visual imagery and complex storylines) are much more likely to occur during REM, sleep studies have found that people awakened from non-REM sleep reported vivid dreams about 5-10% of the time. Apart from these exceptions, recall of mental activity during non-REM sleep tends to be poor, but when it is recalled, it is more often described as "thought-like" than "dream-like."

Answer: Paradoxical sleep

During non-REM sleep, the muscles are not paralysed and phenomena like sleepwalking and sleep talking are more likely to occur during this stage than in REM. Brain activity is much more quiescent in non-REM, whereas in REM the limbic system and various parts of the cerebral cortex become much more active.

In particular, activity in the visual cortex of the occipital lobe produces the intense imagery characteristic of dreaming.

Answer: True

Studies on dream journals that individuals have kept for long periods have found that themes that reappear frequently in a person's dreams tend to be things the person is concerned with in daily life. Additionally, dream themes are more likely to reflect a person's fantasies than their actual behaviour.

This is especially true in relation to sexual and aggressive themes that a person might fantasize about but be reluctant or unable to act out in real life. For example, a 2014 study found that people who had ever dreamed of killing someone tended to score higher on a measure of hostility (e.g., being short-tempered or having the urge to hurt someone while being in a rage) than those who had not. Fortunately, none of the people in this study had killed anyone in real life!

Answer: Activation-synthesis model

Hobson is an American psychiatrist who researches sleep and dreaming. The activation-synthesis model proposes that, during REM sleep, the brain stem generates random impulses that stimulate the visual cortex producing vivid images. The sleeper's brain then attempts to assemble these images into some kind of story using information from memory.

The random nature of the stimuli explains why dream plots tend to be confused and nonsensical. This theory is in sharp contrast to psychoanalytic accounts that propose that dreams have deep symbolic meanings that represent unconscious conflicts.

Answer: Ponto-geniculo-occipital waves

These "PGO" waves originate in the brainstem in a region called the pons, travel to the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus, and then to the primary visual cortex of the occipital lobe. The density of these waves corresponds with the amount of eye movement during REM. Based on this, Allan Hobson and colleagues proposed that PGO waves were primarily responsible for dreaming.

However, the fact that dreams can also occur during non-REM sleep indicates that this is not entirely true, so there appear to be other important mechanisms involved.

Answer: Negative

Studies on dream content have found that, in both men and women, about 80% of the emotions reported were negative in nature, including anger, apprehension, sadness, and confusion. The reasons for this are not well understood, but it has been suggested that dreams might function as a way of processing or preparing for problematic experiences.

Answer: Men have a higher percentage of dreams involving physical aggression; women have a higher percentage of dreams about rejection and exclusion

Findings about gender differences in dream content tend to reflect actual differences in interests and behaviour between men and women in real life. For example, boys and men engage in more physical aggression, while girls and women are more sensitive to and more likely to engage in social forms of aggression, such as socially excluding others, and these differences are reflected in their dreams. Additional findings are that women have more dreams about conversations, clothing and household items, while men have more dreams about physical activities, cars, and tools. Such findings support the idea that there is a degree of continuity between dreaming and a person's waking mental life.

Answer: Image Rehearsal Therapy

Image Rehearsal Therapy involves having the dreamer recall the nightmare, write it down, change the theme, story line, ending, or any part of the dream to a more positive one, and rehearsing the rewritten dream scenario so that the content of the dream can be actively changed whenever it recurs. An article published in the "Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine" in 2010 recommended Image Rehearsal Therapy as one of several evidence-based treatments for nightmare disorder.

Answer: True

In sleep studies by dream research Stephen LaBerge, participants who developed the ability to induce lucid dreams were trained to make predetermined signals, such as moving their eyes in a specific pattern when they became aware that they were dreaming while they were being monitored by researchers in a sleep lab. Sceptics of lucid dreaming had previously maintained that these were not true dreams but instances in which a person awakened from sleep and then had a vivid fantasy. LaBerge's studies, in which the dreamers' brainwaves were monitored, were able to confirm that lucid dreaming occurred during the actual sleep state, usually during REM, by monitoring when the dreamers gave their pre-arranged signals.

Answer: Openness to experience (e.g., imaginative, artistic interests)

Personality traits are best thought of as being on a continuum, so that a given person may have different levels of any of these traits compared to other people. Openness to experience is associated with the breadth and depth of a person's mental life, so that those who are relatively low on this trait tend to be conventional and practical, whereas those who are high on it tend to have rich inner lives and enjoy intellectual and creative pursuits. Studies have found that people who are interested in their dreams are more likely to remember them, and as people high in openness to experience have a heightened interest in their inner life, it is not surprising that they tend to pay more attention to their dreams than others, and recall them more frequently.