Theories of Sleeping and Dreaming

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| 2011 | | BROOKLANDS COLLEGE, WEYBRIDGEPatricia Orozco | Theories of Sleeping and Dreaming | A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor's book. ~Irish Proverb | Graph 1.Dreaming twice (Orozco,2011) Contents INTRODUCTION | 2 | BIOLOGICAL RHYTHMS | 2 | STAGES OF SLEEP GRAPH | 3 | EVOLUTIONARY AND RESTORATION THEORIES OF SLEEP | 4 | THEORIES OF DREAMING | 5 | CONCLUSION | 6 | REFERENCE | 6 | Sleeping and dreaming is a private experience, so no surprise that the first men had their own theories about sleep. One was that while the person sleeps his soul is separated from the body to meet the spirit of the night. Orthodox Jews regarded it as a kind of temporary death and thanked God for putting the heart back by morning. The ancient Greeks were the first who tried to explain it "scientifically." The philosopher Aristotle related to the activity of the heart and an "evaporation on the process of nutrition". Likewise, Plato also related dreams with the waking hours and the mental operations (Rizzo, 1998). Even in the Old Testament and Hebrew literature, dreams are particularly important because they considered them as divine revelations. Sleep is a physiological state in which the level of surveillance is diminished and the individual rests. It is a biological necessity that allows us to spend 30% of our lives asleep. Sometimes the sleep state may be altered by physical or psychological reasons, which cause potentially serious disorders. Sleep state is reversible in response to specific stimuli and generates electroencephalographic changes that distinguish it from waking state (Guyton, 2005, 831). The sleep is periodic and generally spontaneous and is accompanied in man by a loss of consciousness vigil. However, even when man is
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