Сны и сновидения

Contents

Introduction 3
The Theory of Dreams 4
Conclusion 9
Literature 10

Introduction

There is no doubt that for thousands of years many people were fascinated by such a common thing as dream. But being usual to us dream still remains a mystery. We have many questions about its nature and only few answers.
Many people have been asking themselves for years “Why do we dream?”, but only recently dreams have been subjected to empirical research and concentrated scientific study. For many years they were only a source of inspiration for poets and a subject of speculations for common people who thought that dreams contains some predictions about their future.
First of all we should answer a question about the key word of our essay “What is a dream?” We call “a dream” all those images, emotions and thoughts which we can see while we are sleeping. Dreams can be very real and vivid or vague and unrealistic. We can feel joy or fright in the dream, and when our dreams are unpleasant and frightful we call them nightmares.
There is a common opinion among the psychologists that dreams help us to sort through event of the day or our problems and things that require a lot of attention. Besides there is a theory that we dream in order to exercise various neural connections that some researchers believe affect certain types of learning.
In our essay we are going to describe several the most interesting and influential theories explaining why do we dream and what are the dreams.
So there are several problems which we are going to solve in our essay:
1) to describe Freud’s theory of dreams guiding by his book The Interpretation of Dreams;
2) to gave a characteristic to modern theories considering theirs pros and contras.
To solve these problems we explore several books and essay on the dream theory. All of them are pointed out in the part Literature of our work. 

Conclusion

So according to the subject of our essay we described several points of view to the dreams.
We dream a lot. Some of us dream approximately half of our life, so no one can say that it is unimportant to explore dreams.
People were interested in dreams since ancient times, but their efforts to explain who we dream were not scientific. They used their imagination rather than scientific data. So there were many legends and prejudice about dreams especially about so called prophetic dreams.
Freud was one of the first scientists who use scientific methods to explain dreams. He explored his own dreams and the dreams of his patients to build up a theory that in our dreams we see our wishes fulfilled.
Nowadays there are much more scientific theories about the dreams. To explain this phenomenon scientists explore the activity of our brain. For example there is a theory that dreams are just randomly-generated stories our brain tells us and they have not any purpose. Or dreams help us to forget some traumatic experience. But none of these theories can be called quite satisfying.
But whatever the underlying reasons for why dreams arise, the physiological and neurological mechanisms under pinning the act of dreaming are, while still not entirely understood, gradually beginning to become clearer as modern research progresses.
Many psychologists and scientists still cannot say for sure what the dreams are and why we dream. There is no consensus among the scientists. And if we consider all the time we spend in dreams the fact that the purposes and reasons of dreams still remain a mystery for researchers can be disappointing. However, it is important to consider that science is still unraveling the exact purpose and function of sleep itself.