Abstract

The studies reported in the following articles are aimed at providing a comprehensive, detailed, and quantitative picture of cognition in human dreaming. Our main premises are that waking, REM sleep, and non-REM sleep represent physiologically distinct and identifiable brain states and that the differences between waking, REM, and NREM mentation reflect these physiological differences. We have studied dreams at a formal level of analysis and, in these papers, have studied the specific dream properties of emotions, bizarre transformations, scene shifts, and plot coherence, in adults and 4- to 10-year-old children, as part of a larger effort to map state-dependent mental phenomena back onto the varying neurobiological processes that must underlie them. We believe that such efforts will enhance our understanding not only of dreaming and its neurophysiological substrates, but also of the cognitive processes that dreaming shares with other unusual mental states