Anu Bhandary D Line Psychology

To what extent do dreams reflect one’s emotional processes?
Anu Bhandary D line Psychology
Dreams are the subject of great debate and have been for years; whether they harbour subconscious desires or they simply are the result of our attempts to understand and process. It is unsure if we will ever be able to understand the significance or insignificance of our dreams. However, do dreams in any way reflect the way someone feels? Can they give us insight into how well we are doing in processing our emotions? They absolutely can. Our dreams can show us how our brain is attempting to understand our thoughts and feelings and process that information to store. For example, breast
Women who have breast cancer tend to dream about their illness and the implications that come with it, for example, medical tests and death. Whereas, women of the same age without breast cancer dream about occurrences in their lives for example, relationships. A study done by King & DeCicco (2007) showed that there was a correlation between those who had poor health and dreams about body deformation, injuries, illnesses and body parts. In 1993, Wood et al. (cited as King, 2006), conducted a study in which they tested patients with Obstructive Airway Disease (OAD). They acquired an experimental group with patients with OAD and asthma and a control group without asthma. It was found that patients with OAD and asthma had three times more intrusive nightmares than those without. In this specific study, women with breast cancer were the control group and they were compared against a control group of women without, and their dreams were analysed. The women with breast cancer frequently dreamt of their health and suffered nightmares in relation to their illness. The control group however, dreamt about their relationships, their jobs and other stressors they may have (DeCicco, et al., 2010). This is consistent with the theory that we dream to process information. The Cognitive Theory of Dreaming was first proposed by David Foulkes
PTSD is a disorder of memory in which a person is subject to great trauma that trigger a set of unpleasant reactions (Beyond Blue, Ltd., 2016). Emotional processing is the brain’s ability to process stressors and trauma. However, in PTSD patients this ability to do so is impaired. People who suffer from PTSD often have nightmares in which they relive the incident. During sleep, it is essential to go through all the sleep processes such as REM (rapid eye movement) and Non-REM sleep. A study done by Ross, et al. (1994) showed that PTSD sufferers do not achieve proper REM sleep. REM sleep is crucial for memory consolidation; however, it is also the time in which the amygdala is most active (BBC, 2009). The amygdala is a structure in the brain responsible for emotions such as fear, in PTSD sufferers, the amygdala is more active as opposed to those who do not have the disorder (Shin, et. al., 2006). Another structure of the brain is the hippocampus it is the part of the brain responsible for memory. To consolidate memories, the hippocampus is active during sleep. However, PSTD sufferers have a smaller hippocampus to those without, therefore interrupting emotional processing (Collins, 2015). They do not process and store memories like Foulkes’ theory suggests. Rather than processing their emotions, they are