DREAMING - A NEUROCOGNITIVE APPROACH

The studies reported in the following articles are aimed at providing a comprehensive, detailed, and quantitative Picture of cognition in hu man dreaming. our main premises are that waking, REM sleep, and non-RE M (NREM) sleep represent physiologically distinct and identifiable bra in states and that the differences between waking, REM, and NREM menta tion reflect these physiological differences. We have studied dreams a t a formal level of analysis and, in these papers, have studied the sp ecific dream properties of emotions, bizarre transformations, scene sh ifts, 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 cognit ive processes that dreaming shares with other unusual mental states. ( C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.