The Evolution of Fear in Wakefulness and Dreams

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 naive 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.