Summarize two theories of the meaning of dreams. Which do you think best explains why we dream? What are the problems with it?

What will be an ideal response?

* Sigmund Freud believed that you remember the manifest content of your dreams, but to understand them you must know the latent content.
* Analysis of the latent content would reveal the underlying urges, sexual or aggressive, you were trying to express.
* Calvin Hall believed that he saw symbols in dreams that helped better explain them and that most of them we understand (content analysis of dreams).
* Dreams of college students in the Netherlands contain less physical aggression than dreams of Americans. Japanese college students have fewer animals in their dreams than Americans.
* Hobson and McCarley believe that dreams are random bursts of activity from nerve cells in the brain stem with the cortex attempting to make sense of these bursts (activation-synthesis hypothesis).