After the chapter on dreaming, I got really interested in some of the points made in the class. And only after a good amount of thinking about them did I come to a dead-end where I feel like I will never know the answers and I’m not sure if it will ever be possible to find the answers.  The one point that I found most interesting about dreaming, and realized that I definitely do this, was the idea that things are happening in third person as well as first person within my dreams. What I mean by that is that when I dream I see various events happening through my set of eyes but then simultaneously I am seeing myself doing various actions and interacting with people, getting married for instance. I see my entire wedding and standing up at the altar but simultaneously I am looking into the poor fools’ eyes that is about to marry me.  Not sure if that makes any sense but I remember that idea being mentioned quickly and then I forgot to make a comment of any sort. I tried to search why this happens but couldn’t find any empirical information about this.

We also did a good amount of discussing about the creativity level of dreams. I’m pretty sure we agreed that our dreams from the younger years would easily be considered more creative. My opinion on the situation would be the choice of television at different ages, as young children we watched Barney and Sesame Street and I know the kids I babysit for were obsessed with Spongebob Squarepants but now I watch reality TV and Law & Order SVU. I wonder why my dreams have gone south in the creativity. But surprisingly after all that discussion, nightmares were not alluded to. Looking into my younger years, I think I remember more nightmares I had in comparison to creative dreams. I read some empirical articles that indicated that there is an underestimation of nightmare frequency in the parents’ ratings compared to the children’s data. Parents can’t be depended on giving representative data because they don’t actually know. Also a longitudinal study was done to find that children with ‘chronic’ nightmares showed more psychopathological symptoms. It would be interesting to follow-up these children to investigate whether childhood nightmares are also predictive for adult psychopathology. There is also a positive correlation between nightmares and anxiety in children, though this is based on parental surveys it all makes sense. After I found all this information I was surprised we didn’t talk about it in class, but I bet you all remember nightmares from the younger years, and they still terrify you.