I. Introduction
A. Attention Getter: Have you ever woken up from a dream and remembered it clear as day, or not remembered anything at all? How about wondered what your dreams, or what your lack of dreams meant?
B. General Purpose: To inform.
C. Specific Purpose: My goal today is to share with you as much as I can about dreaming.
D. Thesis Sentence: I will describe why and how we dream, answer commonly asked questions about dreaming, and go a little bit into dream analysis.
E. Establish Credibility: For years I’ve tried to find the meaning of my dreams, I’ve even kept dream journals to follow through with my curiosity, and now I’ve done extensive research into the understanding of dreams. …show more content…
Body
A. First of all, let me share the facts about how and why we actually dream.
1. We dream because our brain does not completely shut down when we sleep.
a. The brain is still active, but our muscles are paralyzed.
b. REM sleep disorder is a sleep disorder where our muscles are not paralyzed during REM sleep; therefore a person will excessively move in their sleep, which explains sleep walking, or sleep talking.
c. REM stands for rapid eye movement
d. The system of the brain that directs our dreams is called the limbic system.
e. The limbic system also controls our emotions; hence, if a person has many sad dreams, their dreams alone can lead them into a depression.
2. Now back to REM, we have two ways of dreaming, REM sleep and non-REM sleep.
a. REM sleep lasts about 20 minutes and we cycle into it about every 90 minutes.
b. During REM sleep we have our most vivid dreams because the brain is most active, explaining our rapid eye movement and why it’s called REM sleep.
c. When we’re not in REM sleep we’re in non REM sleep and we can still remember our dreams during this time but often forget them by the time we wake up; we would usually only remember them if we woke up during that period of