Abstract

Freud considered dreams to be compositions of past waking experiences but this theory is untenable: (1) the process of compositing disparate memories into the seamless dream life is miraculous, and (2) authentically novel dream worlds are experienced. Dennett makes dreams into purely cognitive affairs, a matter of scripts, denying their perceptual appearing. I suggest that dreams are de novo constructions of actual perceptual worlds, not put together from memory scraps. Implications for waking perception are considered.