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Original Study
| Published: September 30, 2021
The Evolution of Fear in Wakefulness and Dreams
Undergraduate student, Pune University, Maharashtra, India Google Scholar More about the auther
DIP: 18.01.219.20210903
DOI: 10.25215/0903.219
ABSTRACT
Fear is a primitive emotion, which helps us to steer clear of any potential dangers. In ancient times, fear helped our ancestors to stay alive and survive. Due to the mammalian evolution, the defense mechanisms that help to cope with dangers that threaten disruption in the transport of genes in transportation are successfully developed. In the mammalian environment of the past, the danger would strike quickly without a). The primary dangers were hunting predators, and natural events such as floods, thunder, and lightning. The most common strategies that were used were escape and avoidance. To survive, humans had to evolve a perceptual system to identify potential threats and dangers and a reflexive wired motor system to move away from the perceived danger. With time, the sensory and motor systems were expanded due to the sophisticated nervous system. Dreams can teach us about waking, dreams reflect reality. Nothing ever happens in the waking world until it happens in the dream world. In the dream state an individual can act out their inner desires which they can’t in waking state. Carl Jung believed that dreams served us two purposes; firstly to compensate for the disparity in the individual’s psyche and secondly to provide probable images of the future, which permitted the individual to predict future events. The threat stimulation system would be emerged in a surrounding influenced by the existence of crucial physical threats and naïve humans hence dream about realistic threat dreams that prepared their control of frightening physical surroundings. Since the time of evolution, humans rehearsed to respond to numerous threats with behavioral actions and this might explain why the reactions of the dreaming individual are mostly about running and fighting. In our contemporary society, most of the threats are emotional and psychological in nature. The threat that we face is very real but dissimilar to what was originally feared by early humans therefore the threat stimulation system gets activated but sometimes misses the mark.
Keywords
Fear, Fear conditioning, Fear systems, Threat stimulation, Dreams, Dream Phenomenology
This is an Open Access Research distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any Medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
© 2021, Varghese S.
Received: August 09, 2021; Revision Received: September 21, 2021; Accepted: September 30, 2021
Article Overview
ISSN 2348-5396
ISSN 2349-3429
18.01.219.20210903
10.25215/0903.219
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Published in Volume 09, Issue 3, July- September, 2021