Dreaming Theory

Until recently, the traditional approach to understanding dreaming has emphasized its narrative or scenario-like character and attempted to elaborate an interpretive scheme that could bring order to the emotional and cognitive chaos of dreaming. The most famous approach of this type is the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud, who abandoned his early hopes for a brain-based approach because the necessary neurophysiological data were then non-existent. Freud was therefore obliged to account for all of the formal properties of dreaming in psychological terms, a heavy burden, which caused his ingenious speculations to become Byzantine in their complexity and comical in their interpretive oversimplification.

Dreaming is a mental state associated with sleep whose characteristics have important implications for theories of normal consciousness as well as for its extreme derangement in major mental illness. The advent of modern sleep laboratory science has provided an objective aspect to the study of dreams and has opened the way to a brain-based theory of dreaming. Recent excitement about the prospects of this agenda stems from the application of brain imaging techniques that allow dream activity in humans to be correlated with the selective activation and deactivation of various brain regions. The modern scientific study of dreaming thus provides an avenue of access to the mind-body problem, one of the most obdurate philosophic conundrums of human history.

While dreaming can be broadly defined as any kind of mental activity occurring in sleep, most people and most brain scientists are interested in a more specific state of mind that is normally unique to sleep. When we say ‘I had the craziest dream last night’ we refer to a conscious experience during sleep marked by visual imagery, delusional misidentification of our state as waking, difficulties with thought processes, emotional intensification, and very significant recent memory loss. It is important to emphasize this particular definition of dreaming for two reasons. The first reason is that this kind of dreaming is so highly correlated with the physiology of the stage of sleep known as paradoxical or REM (rapid eye movement) sleep as to invite an integration of dream psychology with the specific brain processes of REM. The second is that this kind of dreaming shows many of the formal features of such major dysfunctional states as schizophrenia, manic depression, and organic psychoses. But even these intense dreams are not restricted to REM sleep. Furthermore, many other cataclysmic states of mind, like the night terrors of normal children and the horrifying replay of experiences in people who have been brutalized or traumatized, occur almost exclusively in other, non-REM stages of sleep (NREM).