Bizarre Elements of Dreams
by Lillian Bonar
Essay: Bizarre Elements of Dreams
Pages: 11
Rating: 3 stars
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Bizarre Elements of Dreams
In this Experiment, eighty-eight subjects were asked to individually recall and transcribe dreams and daydreams
over a one-week period. It was also requested that they note anything prominent that had happened to them over
that week. Results worksheets were the filled out and data was handed in for analysis. The hypothesis was to test
Hobson & McCartley's activation-synthesis hypothesis that dreams would have more bizarreness than other
waking narratives, Our results, however, failed to support this, instead showing a higher significance of bizarreness
when daydreaming, and supporting the findings of Reinsel, Antrobus & Wollman. Scene shifts and
transformations were also a focus of our study, results were in accordance with our hypothesis, however did not
achieve statistical significance.
A dream may be defined as a mental experience, occurring in sleep, which is characterised by hallucinoid imagery,
predominantly visual and often vivid (Hobson & McCarley, 1977). J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley argue that
dreams are simply the by-product of bursts of activity amaniting from subcortial areas in the brain (Hobson, 1988,
Hobson & McCarley, 1977, McCarley, 1994, cited in W. Weiten, 1998).
One explanation of bizarreness and disruptive discontinuities found in dream reports is provided by the
One explanation of bizarreness and disruptive discontinuities found in dream reports is provided by the
activation-synthesis hypothesis (McCarthy & Hoffman, 1981 sited in Rittenhouse et al). This model (as seen below
in Table 1) proposes that dream bizarreness is a psychological correlate of REM state physiology. The most
important tenet of the activation-synthesis hypothesis is that during dreaming the activation brain generates its
own information by a pontine brain stem neuronal mechani...