F2F Class Notes (Celeste) [R]

Vocabulary

interfere – interrupt, get in the way
eg. The sound coming from her phone was interfering with the class.

chaos – state of confusion which can often lead to danger
eg. The president of the company is coming to the office. So the office is in total chaos.

evidence – proof
eg. The evidence proved that the criminal stole the bag from the woman.

Reading

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-you-shouldnt-tell-people-about-your-dreams/

Why You Shouldn’t Tell People about Your Dreams

I had a friend who tried hard to remember more of her dreams. She’d write them down and then tell people about them. She stopped, though, because it started interfering with her social life. She’d start talking about her dreams and people would leave the room.

There are two major theories about why we dream. The first is the activationsynthesis theory, which holds that dreams are interpretations by our forebrains of essentially random activity from the spinal cord and cerebellum during sleep, especially REM sleep.

Part of the explanation for why dreams can be so weird is that they are interpreted from chaotic information. The evolutionarily older parts of our brains are also the seat of our basic emotions. According to this theory, the emotion comes first and dreams are made to make sense of the emotion. Evidence of this comes from scene-changes that happen: when we have anxiety dreams, for example, they often switch from one anxious situation to a different one—so rather than us feeling anxious because of the content of our dreams, it could be that our feeling is causing an anxious narrative in the dream!

TBC

Pronunciation

synthesis ( sin – this – siss )

chaos ( K os )

chaotic ( K aw – tic )

scene ( seen )