Concept in Definition ABC

The term sleep designates the act of rest of a living organism and is opposed to what is called the waking state or being awake. The dream is characterized by being a state in which there is very little physiological activity (blood pressure, breathing and heartbeats of heart) and very low response to external stimuli.

Dreaming is something involuntary for the human being and generally in the dream there is a reworking of situations experienced while we were awake and that were carefully stored in the memoryAnd contrary to what we would suppose that they would already be forgotten, some of these will reappear in our dreams as a result of this process.

When we fall asleep we enter a kind of virtual reality that is made up of images, sounds, thoughts, and sensations. Meanwhile, we can not always remember what we dream, sometimes we may remember a situation very vividly that was presented to us in a dream or perhaps we go to the other extreme and we do not remember anything or just an image or a sensation that we have left.

Although human beings have always lived this possibility of dreaming, it will not be until the last century when more progress is made on this subject and important discoveries and advances in this regard, as was achieved by the American psychologist William Charles Dement, who discovered that in a sleeping stage, the sleeper experiences rapid eye movements (REM) accompanied by increased pressure blood, respiration and heartbeat, something that was only believed possible in the state of vigil.

Also the psychology has played a fundamental role when it comes to talking about sleep. For example Sigmund Freud and the stream that he founded, the psychoanalysis have distinguished between two types of dream content, the manifest and the latent. In the first the story is as the sleeper repeats that he lives it, while the second for psychoanalysis is what really wants to mean that dream, obviously it would be an opposite of the one experienced by the sleeper and it is here where the psychoanalyst enters scene to truly interpret it.

Finally and beyond these Freudian questions of interpretation or those that gave a prophetic value to sleep in ancient times, sleep turns out to be a necessary and recommended state for both health and good performance whether in the study or at work.