The New Science of Dreaming

Deirdre Barrett & Patrick McNamara, Eds.

Volume I: The Biology of Dreaming

Series Foreword

Chapter 1: Introduction to Volume I (Deirdre Barrett and Patrick McNamara)

Chapter 2: A Neurobiological History of Dreaming (Claude Gottesmann)

Chapter 3: Phylogeny of Sleep and Dreams (Patrick McNamara, Erica Harris, Charles Nunn, and
Robert Barton)

Chapter 4: Neurotransmitters, drugs and dreams (Allan Hobson + co-author David Kahn)

Chapter 5: Current understanding of cellular models of REM expression (Allan Hobson +

coauthor)

Chapter 6: Neuropsychology of REM dreams (Mark Solms)

Chapter 7: Review of neuroimaging studies of REM sleep and dreaming (Pierre Maquet)

Chapter 8: The distributed cortical microprocesses of sleep mentation (John Antrobus)

Chapter 9: The Frontal Lobes and Dreaming (Edward F. Pace-Schott)

Chapter 10: Dreaming alterations associated with neurologic syndromes like stroke, PD, SDAT,
narcolepsy (Sanford Auerbach)

Chapter 11: REM-related dreams in REM behavior Disorders and REM parasomnias (Maria
Livia Fantini)

Chapter 12: NREM and REM physiology and dream content (??Tore Nielsen??)

Chapter 13: Dreams in neuropsychiatric illnesses (??)

About the Editors and Contributors

References
Index
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Volume II: Content, Recall, and Personality Correlates of Dreams

Series Foreword

Chapter 1: Introduction to Volume II (Deirdre Barrett and Patrick McNamara)

Chapter 2: Realistic Simulation and Bizarreness in Dream Content: Past Findings and
Suggestions for Future Research (G. William Domhoff)

Chapter 3: Gender Differences in Dreaming (Michael Schredl)

Chapter 4 Dreams across the Lifespan (G. William Domhoff + co-author)

Chapter 5: Dream Recall (Michael Schredl)

Chapter 6: Personality & Dreaming (Mark Blagrove)

Chapter 7: Impact of dream content on psychological well-being (Antonio Zadra)

Chapter 8: Dreaming and Psychotherapy (Clara Hill +)

Chapter 9: Post-traumatic Dreams (Raj Punamaki)

Chapter 10: Nightmares and Suicidality (Medmed Yucel Argargun)

Chapter 11: Anomalous experiences and dreams (Stanley Krippner)

Chapter 12: Lucid dreaming (Stephen Laberge)

About the Editors and Contributors

References
Index
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Volume III: Cultural and theoretical perspectives on Dreaming

Series Foreword

Chapter 1: Introduction to Volume III (Deirdre Barrett and Patrick McNamara)

Chapter 2: Dreams as generators of cultural artifacts: the case of dreams in Literature (Carol
Ruphrecht)

Chapter 3: Dreams in Ancient Cultures (?)

Chapter 4: Dreams and ethnography (Roger Lohmann)

Chapter 5: Dreams in religious traditions (Kelly Bulkeley)

Chapter 6: Contexualizing Images and emotional memory in dreams (Ernest Hartmann)

Chapter 7: Costly Signaling Theory of Dreams (Patrick McNamara, Erica Harris, and Anna
Kookoolis)

Chapter 8: Phenomenology of Dreaming and Self (Thomas Metzinger)

Chapter 9: Dreams and Creative Problem Solving (Deirdre Barrett)

Chapter 10: Memory processing in dreams (Bob Stickgold??)

Chapter 11: Threat simulation theory (Katja Valli and Aniti Revensuo)

Chapter 12: Continuity of Dream-wake imagery continuum (Bob Kunzendorf)

Chapter 13: Neurocognitive model of dreaming (Roar Fosse & G. William Domhoff)

About the Editors and Contributors

References
Index
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Introduction

Deirdre Barrett
&
Patrick McNamara

“What are dreams?” has been a perennial question for philosophers and for ordinary

dreamers throughout history. Over the last century, it has also become a focus of scientific

inquiry. In 1985, Tore Nielsen surveyed scholarly dream articles published over the previous one

hundred years and found that they contained two large waves of activity (Nielsen, 1985). The

first began immediately after the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams

(1900/1965). This surge consisted of clinical articles. Though Freud’s ideas about dreams are

often said to be “discredited,” he actually introduced the characterization that dreams are

predominately visual, metaphoric thought often linked to mental processes outside conscious

awareness. This is now widely accepted and not thought of as “Freudian.” It was Freud’s

emphasis on “wish fulfillment” of primitive sexual and aggressive urges as the overriding

motivations in dreams which psychology has discarded. Freud also believed that dreams

occurred only when a conflict arose whereas research has come to show that we dream regularly

through the night and recall only a fraction of this. Research showing the average dream is the

negative side of neutral (Hall & Van de Castle, 1966) similarly made a central role for wish

fulfillment more vulnerable to Occam’s razor. The more extreme and obviously erroneous

psychoanalytic assertions are often cited as having discouraged scientific researchers from

exploring dream content and clinical issues.

The next wave of publications came as a physiologic one when Rapid Eye Movement (REM)

sleep was discovered. Aserinsky & Kleitman (1953) observed that the brain, cardiovascular, and
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respiratory systems became more active at approximately 90 minute intervals through the night.

This corresponded with the timing of awakenings likeliest to result in a dream report. There were

high hopes that this discovery might shed light not only on dreaming, but on personality and

mind/brain controversies in general. Though subsequent studies added much detail to the portrait

of REM and its cycling with other stages of sleep, initially they did not impact clinical or

cognitive knowledge of dreaming, much less other aspects of psychology. The physiologic

researchers didn’t combine their research with the type of detailed content studies in which

clinicians are interested. The tone of their articles often implied that all interesting questions

about dreams had had been solved by describing the physiological processes of REM. In 1979,

dream researcher Harry Fiss observed:

The fact that sleep researchers have thus emphasized the biological substratum

of dreaming and by and large neglected the psychological experience of dreaming

has given rise to a curious paradox: despite the monumental achievements in sleep

research in recent years, our prevalent notions of dreaming continue to be derived

principally from clinical practice and psychoanalysis—as if REM had never been

discovered. In brief, the technological breakthrough of the fifties and sixties has

had relatively little impact on our understanding of dreaming. (Fiss, 1979, p. 41)

Over the last two decades, however, there has been more cross-fertilization of content and

physiologic studies of dreaming. The technology has advanced so that researchers can identify

the biochemistry and neuroimaging of the dreaming brain in enough detail to relate it to what is

known about the psychological functions of these specific areas. Clinical and cognitive

researchers have also begun comprehensive studies which tie into physiological findings. The

subjective and physiologic data on dreaming are finally beginning to inform each other. New
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dream research has become relevant to helping clinicians treat post-traumatic stress and anxiety

disorders. It is becoming a tool for cognitive psychologists studying the orienting response and

memory. Dream studies are beginning to tell us more about brain development—both across

species and across the human lifetime.

The New Science of Dreaming brings together this exciting new body of research. The

volumes are organized around three broad themes: neurophysiological research; dream content

and clinical approaches; and theoretical and cultural perspectives.

Volume I presents the recent physiological studies of dreaming—mostly characterizing

REM sleep, but also including non-REM dreams and the differential aspects of REM most linked

to dream characteristics. In Chapter 1, Claude Gottesmann surveys the history of research on the

physiology of dreaming sleep. He begins with researchers some two centuries ago who noted

isolated signs of REM without fully identifying it and follows this through the latest discoveries

on biological characteristics of the state. In Chapter 2, Patrick McNamara, Charles Nunn, Robert

Barton, Erica Harris, and Isabella Capellini describe the phylogeny of REM and NREM and at

what point in evolution a process analogous to dreaming may have arisen. Using REM sleep as a

proxy for the dreaming brain/mind, McNamara et al. find that REM is most prominent in

terrestrial, placental mammals and only occurs bi-hemispherically. NREM, on the other hand,

can occur in a single hemisphere. Thus the evolution of REM sleep may be tied to the evolution

of brain structures like the corpus collosum that facilitate inter-hemispheric transfer of

information. In Chapter 3, Allan Hobson discusses cellular and molecular models of dreaming

and how they account for such formal dream features as sensorimotor hallucinosis, delusional
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errors of state identification, emotional intensification and memory loss. In Chapter 4, Hobson

explores how drugs alter these to affect dreaming.

In Chapter 5, Thien Thanh Dang-Vu, Manuel Schabus, Martin Desseilles, Sophie

Schwartz, and Pierre Maquet review neuro-imaging studies of REM sleep. The emerging picture

reveals activation of the pons, the thalamus, temporo-occipital and limbic/paralimbic areas

(including the amygdala), along with a relative quiescence of dorsolateral prefrontal and inferior

parietal cortices. The authors note that these correlate well with observed cognition during

dreaming. In Chapter 6, Edward Pace-Schott focuses in more detail on one of these findings--

the frontal lobes’ diminished activation during REM--to account for many dream characteristics.

In Chapter 7, David Kahn discusses how biochemical differences during REM decrease access to

episodic memory and diminish the tendency to reflect on implausibility, incongruity,

discontinuity and illogical thinking. In Chapter 8, Erin Wamsley and John Antrobus describe

their “Dual Rhythm” model of dreaming which suggests that both the REM-NREM cycle and

changes in cortical activation across the 24-hour cycle are sources of non-specific brain

activation supporting mentation during sleep. Maria Livia Fantini and Luigi Ferini-Strambi’s

Chapter 9 describes REM Behavior Disorder and other REM parasomnias in which movement is

disinhibited during REM and people often thrash around—apparently acting out dreams. She

discusses how the dream content interacts with the disorder. Finally, in Chapter 10, Patrick

McNamara, Deirdre McLaren, Sara Kowalczyk, and Edward Pace-Schott describe the

contrasting physiologies of REM and NREM sleep states and then report new data on dreams

associated with these two sleep states. They find that while attributions of mental states to dream

characters by the dreamer occurs in both sleep states, these ‘theory of mind’ abilities are much

more robust in REM than in NREM sleep.

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Volume II presents cognitive, personality and clinical research on dreams. In Chapter 1,

G. William Domhoff reviews content studies and finds that they do not support the common

stereotype of dreams as highly emotional, bizarre, or similar in structure or content to

schizophrenia or delirium. He concludes that most dreams are reasonable simulations of waking

life containing occasional rare features such as distorted settings and objects, unusual characters,

inexplicable activities, strange images and metamorphoses, and sudden scene shifts. In Chapter

2, Michael Schredl examines the literature on gender differences in dreaming, summarizing the

major findings: women recall dreams more often than men; men’s dreams have more physical

aggression and work settings; women’s dreams contain more people and household objects. He

discusses how these findings map onto differences between gender roles in waking life, and

suggests this is supportive of the continuity hypothesis of dreaming.

In Chapter 3, Roar Fosse and G. William Domhoff present a model of dreams as “non-

executive orienting”—suggesting that dynamic oscillations of the dreaming networks cause them

to self-organize into narrow but spatially extended corridors of attention which reach

consciousness awareness. In Chapter 4, Michael Schredl reviews the literature on dream recall

and proposes a model by which major correlates-- stress, personality, attitudes toward dreams,

sleep arousal and retrieval effects, and memory-especially visual memory--all interact to produce

the variations we observe in dream recall. In Chapter 5, Mark Blagrove looks in more detail at

the effects of personality on recall and dream content differences. In Chapter 6, Clara E. Hill and

Patricia Spangler review the history of dreams in psychotherapy and modern empirical evidence

on outcomes of dream work, including differential predictors of who benefits most. They

conclude that there is strong evidence that working with dreams in therapy is beneficial but that

more research is needed to determine the effective components. The next chapters explore
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nightmares. In Chapter 7, Mehmet Yücel Argargün describes these as terrifying REM dreams. He

distinguishes between spontaneous nightmares, as opposed to posttraumatic ones, and explores a

possible relationship between suicidality and nightmares. In Chapter 8, Raija-Leena Punamäki

reviews the effects of trauma on dreaming. She describes post-traumatic nightmares and

discusses how other dream parameters—frequency of recall, tendency toward recurring dreams,

dreaming about the trauma or not—can predict who will recover better from trauma vs. who goes

on to experence long-lasting PTSD. In Chapter 9, Tore Nielsen & Jessica Lara-Carrasco suggest

that dreaming serves an emotional regulation function and that nightmares are expressions of this

function. They propose several possible mechanisms that may be central to emotion regulation

during dreaming, especially during nightmares, including desomatization, contextualization,

progressive emotional problem-solving and fear memory extinction.

The last two chapters of Volume II are devoted to special types of dreams. In Chapter 10,

Stanley Krippner describes reports of strange, extraordinary, and unexplained experiences related

to dreams which have fascinated people throughout the millennia. He gives examples of beliefs

in dream precognition and divine guidance in Ancient Egypt Assyrian, Babylonian, and

Sumerian cultures, follows these beliefs through Tibetan Buddhist, Hindu, and Native American

traditions and then reviews modern parapsychology research on dreaming. In Chapter 11,

Stephen LaBerge reviews the research on ‘lucid dreaming’—dreams in which the dreamer

realizes that they are dreaming. He describes the first volitional signaling by eye movements

from a lucid dream which established that they were indeed occurring in REM, and he reviews

the research on characteristics of REM which make lucidity more or less likely as well as

intentional strategies to elicit the state.

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Volume III presents cultural and theoretical perspectives on dreaming. This includes the

perspectives of disciplines quite distinct from psychology. It also covers new psychological

theories—many of which arise from the new field of evolutionary psychology. It begins with

looks at the perspectives of ethnography, religion, and literature. In Chapter 1, Carol Rupprecht

suggests that dreaming is the earliest form of human creativity and that literature made its first

appearance when dreams went from being narrated orally to being written down. In Chapter 2,

Roger Lohmann describes how ethnography views dreams content, interpretation, and use in

terms of cultural values, categories, expectations, and social conventions. In Chapter 3, Kelly

Bulkeley surveys the role of dreams in Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism and

the local spiritualities of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. He then presents his own research

on dreams which the dreamer identifies as a mystical or religious experience. He concludes that

mystical dreams may serve as “spirit simulations” provoking greater awareness of non-human

beings and powers with whom humans may form beneficial relationships.

The next several chapters present different functional and evolutionary theories of

dreaming. In Chapter 4, Katja Valli and Antti Revonsuo suggests that the function of dreams is

“threat simulation” and perhaps simulation of other categories of events linked to survival. In

Chapter 5, Patrick McNamara, Erica Harris and Anna Kookoolis propose that REM and

dreaming are best explained by the evolutionary concept of “costly signaling.” While most

characteristics and behaviors are adaptive, some are ironically selected exactly because they

handicap the individual—indicating a robustness of all other survival mechanisms. Chapter 6 by

Deirdre Barrett posits that dreams are thinking or problem solving in a different biochemical

state from that of waking. She reviews research on dreams and problem solving and proposes

that specific characteristics of dream mentation are determined by which sensory modalities we
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must monitor, the need to remain still and quiet during sleep, she suggests, but other aspects of

the state seems to be fine-tuned to certain psychological purposes.

In Chapter 7, Robert Kunzendorf proposes an alternative to Freud’s position that dreams

represent wish fulfillment to account for the same symbolic phenomena of dream imagery which

Freud described. Kunzendorf’s model is a continuum of decreasing symbolism from nocturnal

dreaming to normal daydreaming to wakeful self-talk, and also a continuum of decreasing

symbolism across individual development as people mature. In Chapter 8, Ernest Hartmann

characterizes dreams as hyperconnective compared to waking thought. He says these connections

are guided by emotions which can be identified by identifying the “Central Image” of the dream.

In Chapter 9, Jennifer Michelle Windt and Thomas Metzinger trace philosophical perspectives on

dream consciousness from Aristotle’s On Dreams through Descartes’ first Meditation, Bertrand

Russell’s Human Knowledge, and finally Daniel Dennett’s modern musings on dreams. They

assert that philosophers’ skepticism about dream awareness is more than an armchair exercise of

theoretical doubt—that dreaming is a paradigm for questions about consciousness, truth, and

reality. In Chapter 10, Alan Lloyd critically reviews several evolutionary theories of dreaming

and then integrates insights from evolutionary theory with psychoanalytic theory into a fresh and

clinically relevant approach to dreams. In chapter 11 Richard Schweickert applies new

mathematical techniques from complexity theory and network theory to social interconnections

of characters in and among dreams. He reports that many dreams can be described formally as

‘small world networks’ which are networks that are connected in such a way as to facilitate

transfer of optimal amounts of information between nodes in the network. Interestingly, the

famous ‘engine man’s dreams’ may be an exception to this rule.

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Altogether, these essays provide a summary of the contemporary knowledge of dreaming.

They integrate cognitive, personality and clinical issues with physiology, and prioritize questions

about dreams which we want to answer over the next couple of decades.

We believe that a real science of dreams is now on the agenda and that the essays in these

books support this belief.

References

Aserinsky, E., & Kleitman, N. (1953). Regularly occurring periods of eye motility, and

concomitant phenomena during sleep. Science, 118, 273-274.

Fiss, H. (1979). Current dream research: A psychobiological perspective. In B. Wolman (Ed.),

Handbook of dreams (pp. 20-75). New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Freud, S. (1965). The interpretation of dreams (J. Strachey, Trans.) London: Oxford University

Press. (Original work published 1900)

Hall, C., & Van de Castle, R. (1966). The content analysis of dreams. New York: Appleton-

Century-Crofts.

Nielsen, T. (1985). One century of dream research. ASD Newsletter, 2(3), 1 and 3.