• Question: What part of your brain is responsible for dreams? And do you think they are a result of unconscious thoughts like the psycho dynamic approach believes?

    Asked by Olivia to Ben, Sam, Kirsty, Maggi, Rose on 16 Jun 2017.
    • Photo: Kirsty Miller

      Kirsty Miller answered on 16 Jun 2017:

      Hi Olivia, good question 🙂 Research just this year has found that dreaming was linked to an area in the back of the brain that the researchers called the “posterior cortical hot zone”.
      The idea is certainly that dreaming is your brain try to process unconscious thoughts and make sense of what has been going on. However, I do think there is a role for conscious thought too – our dreams can really be a mixture of everything!

    • Photo: Rose Turner

      Rose Turner answered on 17 Jun 2017:

      Hi Olivia, one aspect of the Freudian approach to dreams is that they can serve as ‘wish-fulfilment’ – you dream about something you wish would happen. I have certainly experienced that, but I’m not sure I buy into the whole of the psychoanalytic view on dreams. One area that is quite interesting is that of ‘lucid dreaming’. This is when you have some conscious awareness that you are dreaming (and some people think they can control what happens in their dreams in this state), but other parts of the dream are unconscious, like most other non-lucid dreams. Research has shown that this dreams state appears to involve both conscious and unconscious aspects, and that activity in the brain different from both the REM (rapid eye movement) sleep state in which most dreams occur, and from being awake. So it seems as though dreams (like most psychological phenomena) are complicated, and that there is a lot of variation within dreaming.

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