Two scholars, Dement and wolpert, engaged in this research earlier. At first, they noticed that most new subjects who just came to the sleep lab often incorporated the novel environment of the sleep lab into their dream plots when describing their dream stories. Obviously, changes in sleep conditions will be reflected in dreams. Dement and wolpert got inspiration from it and designed a series of interesting experiments. The method of the experiment is very simple, that is, changing the environmental conditions when the subjects sleep to see if it will be reflected in their dreams. The whole experiment is divided into three parts, first cold water, then strong light, and then music. As a result, only 42% of the subjects' dream reports involved water, 23% talked about light and 9% talked about music. These data don't seem to explain the problem well.
1966, P Milli designed an overdose experiment. He asked the subjects to do physical labor for six hours before going to bed, but the experimental results showed that these people had no physical labor at all in their dreams. Based on this, Millie put forward the theory of "balance and complementarity". He believes that when awake, life and dreams are balanced and complementary. For example, if you do a lot of manual work during the day, you will definitely not do it in your dreams.
However, it didn't take long for the theory of "balance and complementarity" to get into trouble. 1968, physiologist Tao Bo made an experiment that could not be explained by the theory of "balance and complementarity". Taubel asked the subjects to wear rose-colored glasses for two weeks in a row. As a result, the scenery in their dreams turned rosy, which clearly showed that the conscious feeling continued into the dream. But according to the theory of "balance and complementarity", the scenery in the dream should be complementary or colorless, but this is not the case.
Many of the above experimental results have led scholars to give the same and completely different explanations, but one thing seems to have become clear, that is, when the waking environment encounters some special changes, new content related to it will be added to the dream mirror. But at present, the focus of the problem is how to accurately grasp the inevitable relationship between environmental stimuli and dream content. Only by doing this can we achieve the idea of controlling dreams.
Psychoanalytic theory holds that the role of dreams lies in psychological aspects, and dreams are to satisfy wishes. As long as the wishes are satisfied when you are awake, this phase will not appear in your dreams. 1974.Dement carefully selected an experimental object. The subject's strong desire at that time was to eat banana cream pie. When he was about to enter the dream stage (eye movement sleep stage), he was awakened three times and gave a pie each time. When he was awakened for the fourth time, he said, "I am drinking coffee and smoking (he usually drinks coffee and smokes after every meal)." On the fifth call, he said, "I was given a plate at the dinner table, and I dumped it in the trash can." Wake him up for the sixth time and say to him, "Dr. Dement, I dreamed that I was feeding you pie." The experimental results show that satisfying the desire to eat pie can't stop dreaming, but the theme of the dream will become unwilling to eat again.
Later, two American scientists, witkin and Lewis, measured the content of dreams by stimulating the real environment. The stimuli they used were four movies, one of which was the process of pregnant women giving birth; One is that primitive tribal men cut the penis foreskin of male teenagers with sharp stones; One is the story that the mother monkey tore open the dead baby monkey and ate it; There is also a plain landscape film. Results According to the subjects' reports, most of the contents of the first three films were programmed as dreams, while the plain landscape films were not at all. The above experiments seem to explain a problem. The external stimuli in real life are relatively strong, and those stimuli are more likely to appear in dreams, which is recognized by many scholars.
Regarding whether people can control the content of dreams, the only answers that can be made at present are; It seems that external stimuli before and after falling asleep may be programmed into dreams. However, it involves many physiological mechanisms and their regularity, and there are too many changing factors, so it is difficult to standardize at present. Scholars in this field feel that it is very complicated and difficult to control the conditions before and after falling asleep to influence the content of dreams. This is just as American psychologist Cartwright said: "If you are very dry before going to bed, some people will dream of the ocean, some people will dream of the desert, and some people will dream of an emotional state that no one can understand, but is related to dry mouth." Therefore, we need a more accurate method to measure the content of dreams, then we can understand the meaning of dreams and finally achieve the goal of controlling dreams.