Nightmares+Article+JM

A NYT article on Nightmares by my favorite author, Natalie Angier 1. What does it mean to be "gainfully" employed (line 3)? • It means that he was well employed and had a good life 2. Look up the word "Damoclesian". What does it mean that the knife dangled with "Damoclesian contempt"? • Damoclesian means something that is a threat to you, or feels as though it is a threat. When a knife is dangled with Damoclesian it means that the knife was posing a threat or being threatening. 3. What did the patient fear at night (2 things)? • He had fears of an old woman intruding into his home and dangling a knife above him. 4. How did Dr. Leving help this man? • Dr. Leving helped this man by telling him to change the knife and the fear of the abuse of his mother in his dream. If he no longer feared his abuse as a child, the night mares would end, and they did. 5. When is the last time you had a nightmare you remember? Do you mind sharing it? If not, please do so here... • I don’t remember the last nightmare I had 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) • It means that you want to hurt the characters in your dream before they hurt you. 7. What percentage of dreams are bad dreams? • Most of the dreams you have 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? • REM sleep is when you had rapid eye movement behind closed eyelids while you sleep. REM sleep stands for Rapid Eye Movement during sleep. About 90 percent of dreams happen during REM sleep. 9. How much time do we spend dreaming each night? • 60-70 percent of the time we sleep we are dreaming 10. How does the frequency of nightmares change as we age? (Be specific with ages and number of nightmares) • preschoolers do not have many bad dreams, while children from ages 5-12 have more frequent bad dreams. People are more likely to have more bad dreams during their adolescence and then it begins to decline after you become an adult. The peak of bad dreams is when you are a young adult. 11. Which parts of the brain are active during dreaming (Be specific, name the parts and their function)? • The tranquilized is the primary visual cortex, which gets visuals from the outside world. Then the secondary visual cortex deciphers the signals through out it. Also the motor systems are effected during REM sleeping keeping your body motionless so you do not act out your dreams. 12. What is the possible function of bad dreams? And why are nightmares disfunctional? • A possible function of bad dreams is to make it so you no longer fear certain things anymore. If we didn’t have bad dreams than people would fear the same things they did when they were a young child when they were an adult. Nightmares are disfunctional because waking up while you are having a nightmare makes it so you can not et over that fear.