Dreaming and consciousness

Abstract

Research in the second half of the twentieth century may finally have succeeded in constraining the boundaries of reasonable discussion about dreams and dreaming. Largely owing to physiological discoveries and psychophysiological methods for the representative sampling of human dreamlife, we now have a body of observations that delimits plausible explanations and theories. For example, we now know that neither REM sleep nor its dreaming is a sporadic, fleeting response to intense psychic needs or peripheral organ states, but rather is an autonomous, cyclically recurring process which consumes relatively much of our sleep, indeed of our lives. We also know that the content of representatively sampled dreams of both adults (Snyder, 1970) and children (Foulkes, 1982) is generally realistic and mundane, rather than fantastic and bizarre. From this finding, and from direct com parisons of representatively sampled laboratory-collected dreams with spon taneously remembered home dreams (e.g. Foulkes. 1979). it has become apparent that the idea of dreaming as being full of strange and discontinuous imagery is a stereotype based on limited acquaintance with our own dreamlife. Specifically, our most ordinarily memorable dreams seem to be those relatively few that are particularly emotionally engaging, particularly unrealistic, or particularly odd in their imagery or thematic sequence. This leads us to underestimate the orderliness of a process that typically functions plausibly and coherently, in a similar if not identical manner to that which we believe (perhaps also stereotypically) characterises our non-dreaming experience. Thus, studies of representatively sampled dreaming have shown that dream imagery itself typically is realistic or plausible (Dorus, Dorus, & Rechtschaffen, 1971). that dream speech typically is both grammatically correct and appropriate to the imagined situation in which it is embedded (Heynick, 1983). that the feelings accompanying dream imagery typically are appropriate to the imagined situations which they accompany (Foulkes, Sullivan, Kerr, & Brown, 1988), and that, overwhelmingly often, dreams progress over time in a continuous rather than a discontinuous way (Foulkes & Schmidt, 1983). Such data indicate the need to radically revise or replace most older dream theories from the clinical tradition. Given the role that physiologists and physiological methods played in the development of these data, it was perhaps inevitable that dream theories would begin to be framed in reductionist terms. And, since the 19505, there have been many attempts to “explain” dream phenomena through their reduction to neurophysiological processes (e.g. Crick & Mitchison, 1983; Hobson & McCarley, 1977)