Can people control the content of dreams?

< p > < / p > < p > Dream is one of the greatest mysteries in the field of biology. For years. This wonderful physiological phenomenon has always been full of mystery, not only puzzling ordinary people, but also full of doubts about scientists. However, in 1900, after the famous Austrian psychologist and psychiatrist Freud initiated the study of dreamology, scholars all over the world began to formally explore the mechanism of dreaming from the aspects of psychology, physiology and medicine. It can be said that everyone has had the experience of dreaming, and at the same time, they all feel that the content of the dream is so incredible, there are often strange combinations, sudden scene changes, people can fly up and fall, want to run but can not move the strange experience. Dreams seem to have no causal law and are not limited by time and space, but everything affects the dreamer's heartstrings, the experience is so real, the emotion is so strong, at the time of the dream does not feel absurd. So is there any connection between absurd dreams and real life? If there is a connection, can humans influence the content of dreams by controlling the conditions before and after sleep? A series of questions have aroused the widespread interest of many scholars. < / p > < p > the earlier researchers in this field are Demente and Walpert from the Craitman Laboratory of the University of Chicago in the United States. At first they noticed that most of the new subjects who had just arrived in the sleep lab often incorporated the novel environment of the sleep lab into their dream plots when telling their dream stories. Obviously, changes in sleep conditions are reflected in dreams. Demente and Walpert learned from it and designed a series of interesting experiments. The method of the experiment is very simple, which is to change the environmental conditions of the subjects during sleep to see if it will be reflected in their dreams. The whole experiment was divided into three parts, first drenched in cold water, followed by bright light, and then music. As a result, only 42% of the subjects' dream reports involved water, 23% talked about light, and 9% mentioned music. These figures do not seem to explain the problem very well. < / p > < p > in 1966, P; millisecond designed the excess method experiment. He asked subjects to do six hours of manual work before going to bed, but the results showed that there was no manual work at all in their dreams. Based on this, Mili put forward the theory of 'balance and complementarity'. He believes that waking life and dreams are balanced and complementary. For example, if you do more physical work during the day, you certainly don't want to do it in your dreams. < / p > < p > however, it was not long before the theory of 'balance and complementarity' ran into trouble. In 1968, physiologist Tao Bo conducted an experiment that could not be explained by the theory of 'equilibrium and complementarity'. Taub asked the subjects to wear rose-colored glasses for two weeks in a row, and as a result, all their dreams turned rose, which clearly indicated that the perception of wakefulness extended into the dream. However, according to the theory of 'balance and complementarity', the scene in the dream should be complementary or colorless, but this is not the case. < / p > < p > many of the above experimental results have led scholars to make the same number of different explanations, but one thing seems to have become clear, that is, the awake environment encounters some special changes. New content related to this will be added in the dream mirror. However, the focus of the current question is how to accurately grasp the inevitable relationship between environmental stimuli and dream content, and only by doing so can we achieve the idea of controlling dreams. < / p > < p > the theory of the psychoanalytic school holds that the function of dreams lies in the psychological aspect, and dreaming is to satisfy the desire, as long as the desire is satisfied when awake, there will be no such content in the dream. 1974. Demente carefully selected one of the subjects for the experiment. The subject's strong desire to eat banana cream pie woke him up three times and gave him a piece of pie each time when he was about to enter the dreaming stage of sleep. When he was awakened for the fourth time, he said, 'I am drinking coffee and smoking (usually he drinks coffee and smoke after every meal).' On the fifth call, he said, 'there was a plate of noodles on the table and I emptied it over the trash can.' He woke him up for the sixth time and said, 'Dr. Demente, I dreamt that I was feeding you a pie.' The results of this experiment show that satisfying the desire to eat pie can not stop dreaming, but the theme of dreams will become unwilling to eat any more. < / p > < p > later, two American scientists, Witkin and Lewis, measured dream content by stimulating the real world. The stimuli they used were four films, one in which a pregnant woman was giving birth, one in which primitive tribesmen cut the penis foreskin of a male teenager with sharp stone slices, and one in which the female monkey tore up and eaten the dead baby monkey. and another is an insipid landscape film. As a result, according to the subjects' report, the contents of the first three films were mostly incorporated into dreams, while the plain landscape films were not at all. The above experiments seem to show that the external stimuli in real life are more intense, and those stimuli are more likely to appear in dreams, which has been agreed by many scholars. < / p > < p > so far the only answer to the question of whether people can control the content of dreams is that external stimuli before and after falling asleep seem to be programmed into dreams. However, it is related to a variety of physiological mechanisms and its regularity, due to too many changing factors, it is difficult to standardize it at present. Scholars in this field find it complex and difficult to influence dream content by controlling the conditions before and after falling asleep. As Cartwright, an American psychologist, said: 'if you go to bed with a dry mouth, some will dream about the ocean, some will dream of the desert, and others will dream of some emotional state that no one can understand but is associated with dry mouth.' Therefore, we first need to have a more accurate method to measure the content of dreams, and then we can understand the meaning of dreams and finally achieve the goal of controlling dreams. < / p >