Of all the components of a good night’s sleep, dreams
seem to be least within our control. In dreams, a window
opens into a world that logic is suspended and dead (41) ______.
people speak. A century ago, Freud formulated his
revolutionary theory which dreams were the disguised (42) ______.
shadows of our unconscious desires and fears. By (43) ______.
late 1970s, neurologists had switched to think (44) ______.
of them as just “mental noise”--the random byproducts of
the neural repair work that go on during sleep. Now researchers (45) ______.
suspect that dreams are part of the mind’s emotional thermostat,
regulating moods while the brain “off-line”. (46) ______.
And one leading authority says that these
intensely powerful mental events can be not only
harnessed but actually brought in conscious control, (47) ______.
to help us sleep and feel better too. "It’s your dream" (48) ______.
says Rosalind Cartwright, chair of psychology at
Chicago’s Medical Center, “If you don’t like it , change it.”
Evidence from brain imaging support this view. The (49) ______.
brain is as active during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep--when
most vivid dreams occur--as it is when fully awake, says Dr, Eric
Nofzinger at the University of Pittsburgh. But not all parts of the brain
are equally involved, the limbic system (the “emotional brain”)
is especially active, while the prefrontal cortex (the center of intellect
and reasoning) is relatively quiet. "We wake up from
dreams happy and depressed, and those feelings can stay (50) ______.
with us all day", says Stanford sleep researcher Dr. William Dement.