Capstone 3 – Site Visit

This weekend, I went to New York City, and I visited a Dream Therapist. His name is Ross Levin. I went to his office and he showed me how he works with his patients and what his job is all about. I went with my mom, and we learned a lot of new information (Including that my dad might have a sleep disorder). I learned about common nightmares and problems Dream Therapists face. I learned that when people are at therapists they threaten to hurt themselves. I had been having a lot of trouble finding a site visit, so I was very thankful when Dr. Levin wrote back. He gave me so many facts that will be very helpful for my final project!

Capstone 2 – My Interview

On Monday I had my interview for Capstone. I did it with a doctor/professor from the Universary of Montreal. His name is Antonio Zadra. He studies dreams, sleep, REM sleep, NREM sleep, parasomnias, sleep disorders and lucid dreaming. I was very happy to have the interview because it took me a long time to find an interview and I had begun to get worried about it. I had emailed a few other people but they either didn’t reply or couldn’t do it.

When I emailed Dr. Zadra he said yes almost right away, and we decided on a time and date. We did our interview over Skype. My best friend, Audrey, helped me set it up. We talked for about 20 minutes and he answered a bunch of my questions. I am very happy that my interview went so well and I can’t wait for my site visit.

Choosing a Topic for Capstone

This week we began to talk about our capstone topics. Capstone is a big project you do in fifth grade about an interest you have. Most of us had already been thinking about our topics for a long time. I wanted to do Broadway casting. The problem was, two people cannot do the same thing and one of my best friends, Audrey, wanted to do it. I thought more about topics and what I was curious about.

After a lot of thinking I thought of something I had always wondered about; Dreams. Things like “How do dreams connect to your brain?” and “Why do you have dreams?”. Once my class all had their topics we began to come up with inquiry questions. We put post-its with questions on posters and graded our questions. Then today we helped each other improve our inquiry questions and started to write subquestions. My inquiry question will be:

“Why do humans have dreams and how do dreams connect to their brains and lives?”

My subquestions will be:

“Do your dreams have anything to do with what is going on in your life?”

“If you have a certain personality trait, will your dreams have anything to do with that personality trait?”

“Why do you only have dreams sometimes?”

“Does having a dream have anything to do with how deep you are sleeping?”

I have had so much fun with my capstone project so far, and I can’t wait to do more!