What Happens to the Brain and Body When We Dream (Essay Sample)

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Introduction
In this article, we will be focusing on dreams, what happens to the brain and body when we dream, and whether dreams mean anything. We need to understand how dreams impact our brains and body while we rest, do they mean anything overall in our lives? How do our bodies react to dreams while we sleep? Dreams fell like an experience of waking life itself. It's composed of a virtual setting of sensory perceptions and emotions. After awakening, the dreamer may recall the dreams due to recollection often fleeting of the dream memory. Since it's an experience shared by everyone, very few people report having never dreamt. Since you can’t use any experimental approach to investigate, it’s difficult to conclude this because dreams can only be accessed indirectly.
Background
There is a theory called the self-organization theory that proposes that when a brain is sleeping, it becomes a self-organizing system that can combine discontinuous and incongruous neuronal signals this is different elements of dreams or a dream into a narrative that is continuous during sleep (Kahn and Hobson 1993 ). This theory also implies that a person’s dreams cannot function independently but rather work together with the sleeping brain. They reflect a dreamer's psychological and physiological activities. This includes memory consolidation, emotional regulation, and external stimuli. That’s why dreams feel like the experience of waking life or a virtual setting.
To understand what really happens to the brain, two lines of investigation were considered: the cognitive approach and the neurobiological approach. Both investigation approaches can be put together with recent research techniques of mapping the brain. Two particular interests were discussed: limbic and paralimbic activation in rapid eye movement (REM) and non-rem. This could explain differences in hallucination during different stages of sleep. The heteromodal cortex being deactivated explains the loss of reality testing and lack of self-consciousness dreams. The complexity in nature of dreaming makes it important that we must distinguish clearly between mental representation and the underlying neurobiological changes (Occhionero, Miranda 2004).
The brain of someone cycles through two phases: rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non-REM sleep. In non-REM, there are three different stages but a person cycles REM and non-REM several times a night. All stages help the mind and body rest and stay rested. They help you feel energetic the next day while others help you learn information and form memories. Experts tell us that physiological aspects of dreams cannot just only be found in the brain but also impact our body parts.
One most noticeable way in which we see the effects in our bodies is when having nightmares. The heart rate changes and you have increased blood pressure. Others experiencing the same show bodily symptoms which include panic, higher perspiration, and a racing heart. Amygdala is the brain center of control of fear which