nightmares+article+homework-+rebecca

1. What does it mean to be "gainfully" employed (line 3)? 2. Look up the word "Damocles ian". What does it mean that the knife dangled with "Damocles ian contempt"? 3. What did the patient fear at night (2 things)? 4. How did Dr. Leving help this man? 5. When is the last time you had a nightmare you remember? Do you mind sharing it? If not, please do so here... 6. What does she mean when she calls nightmares a "sensorily rich nocturnal roundhouse staffed with characters so persuasive you want to ... strangle them, before they can strangle you."? (paragraph 4) 7. What percentage of dreams are bad dreams? 8. What is REM sleep? (You may need to look this up.) What does it stand for? What happens during REM sleep? How much REM sleep do we get in a typical night's sleep? 9. How much time do we spend dreaming each night? 10. How does the frequency of nightmares change as we age? (Be specific with ages and number of nightmares)
 * A NYT article on Nightmares by my favorite author, Natalie Angier**
 * to have a full time respectfully job.- making a pay check.
 * Damoclesian means threating. - the knife dangled in a threating way with contempt to hurt or harm.
 * An intruder of an middle age woman and a knife dangled with Damocles ian contempt from the ceiling over his head.
 * He urged the man to reframe the dream and rehearse alternatives to swinging blades and frozen fear, until finally the nightmares abated and the man could regain his footing.
 * I had a nightmare that my dad had died, and when i woke up the next morning my dad and already left for work, so i didn't see him, and that night i got home late, and my dad had already gone to bed, so i didn't see him all day, and then when i got up the next day, he had left for work early again... so for 2 days i didn't see my dad, and i had had a dream that he was dead, so it was scary. I actually thought that my dream was real.
 * to her, dreams seem real and how the brain and mind can come up with dreams that are so close to reality like.
 * 60-70 percent.
 * REM sleep is when the eyes are flitting behind your closed eye lids. It is rightly renowned as the dreaming stage and at least 90 percent of it spent dreaming. But dreams occur in parts of non-REM sleep as well. When slipping into REM sleep-Dr. Levin said “the whole brain changes.” “Neurochemically, it’s like the Fourth of July,” as cortical precincts shift colors in scanning images to indicate arousal or quiescence, he said, adding, “The limbic system becomes incredibly active, much more so than when you’re awake, which is why you’re emotionally on edge in dreams.”
 * 60 -70% amount a night dreaming.
 * Nightmare rates climb through adolescence, peak in young adulthood, and then, like so much else in life, begin to drop. The average 55-year-old has 1/3 the number of nightmares as the average 25-year-old. At every age girls and women report having significantly more nightmares than do boys and men, a fact that some researchers say may be related to women’s comparatively higher rates of anxiety and mood disorders. 25% of kids ages 5-12 have nightmares at least once a week.

11. Which parts of the brain are active during dreaming (Be specific, name the parts and their function)? 12. What is the possible function of bad dreams? And why are nightmares disfunctional?
 * The brain proceeds through four stages of sleep at night, each characterized by its own pattern of brainwaves and neurochemical activity. REM sleep, when the eyes are flitting behind closed lids, is rightly renowned as the dreaming stage, with at least 90 percent of it spent dreaming. But dreams occur in parts of non-REM sleep, as well. “The limbic system becomes incredibly active, much more so than when you’re awake, which is why you’re emotionally on edge in dreams. Blazing with particularly patriotic fervor in the limbic system are the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex= the brain’s “axis of fear.”, the prefrontal cortex seat of rational thought and critical reasoning is on lunch break- “which is why you can have a dream where something has 4 heads and 12 legs, and you think, ‘No problem, what’s next?’” the primary visual cortex, recipient of visual signals from the outside world. The secondary visual cortex helps process and interpret those signals, remains alert. It is here that the fabulous imagery of dreams probably arises, as the secondary visual cortex strives to decipher the signals ricocheting through it, many of them internally generated, and to splice them into some approximation of a coherent whole.
 * Bad dreams rarely recapitulate unpleasant events from real life but instead cannibalize them for props and spare parts, “A bad dream that doesn’t lead to awakening is successful in dealing with intense emotion,”. “It’s disturbing, but there is some kind of resolution to the extent we don’t wake up.” By this scenario nightmares in allowing you to escape prematurely, represent a failure of the “fear extinction” system. “Bad dreams are functional, nightmares dysfunctional,” he said.