Dream Reports from Sleep Laboratories
Oxford Scholarship Online September 21, 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190673420.003.0002 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Review Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key findings | Argues that frequently replicated sleep-laboratory studies show dreams are a reasonable simulation of waking life and only rarely highly unusual or "bizarre" in structure or content. The reviewed studies also indicate that dreaming occurs in NREM Stage 2, during sleep onset, and even in brief episodes during drifting waking thought, showing dreaming is not tied to one sleep stage or to sleep itself. |
Abstract
Chapter 1 highlights the most important and enduring findings from systematic studies of dreaming in sleep laboratories, then discusses their implications. Most importantly, these frequently replicated studies show that dreams are a reasonable simulation of waking life that are only rarely highly unusual or “bizarre” in their structure or content. These studies also show that dreaming happens in NREM Stage 2, during the sleep-onset process, and even in brief episodes during drifting waking thought, which shows that dreaming is not tied to one stage of sleep, or even to sleep. The chapter explains how dreams collected in the sleep lab can provide a bridge to high-quality studies of dream reports collected in non-lab settings.