The Emergence of Dreaming

Abstract

This book presents a new neurocognitive theory of dreams that documents the similarities of dreaming to waking thought, demonstrates that personal psychological meaning can be found in a majority of dream reports, has a strong developmental dimension based on excellent longitudinal and cross-sectional studies carried out in sleep labs with children ages 3–15, locates the neural substrate for dreaming in the same brain network active during mind-wandering and daydreaming, and marshals the evidence that shows it is very unlikely that dreaming has any adaptive function. These claims are based on five different sets of descriptive empirical findings that were developed between the late 1950s and the first sixteen years of the twenty-first century. All of these findings were unanticipated by scientific dream researchers and then resisted to varying degrees by dream theorists for a variety of reasons. The first five chapters spell out the theory and the evidence for it without any discussion or criticism of past theories. The next two chapters present detailed criticisms of two major alternative theories. The penultimate chapter presents evidence that it is very unlikely that dreaming has any adaptive function in the evolutionary sense of the term, although humans have invented uses for dreams in religious and healing rituals. In that regard, dreaming has an emergent function in culture that was invented in the course of history due to human cognitive capacities. The final chapter presents a general agenda for future research using new methodologies to test all of the neurocognitive hypotheses.