Summary

Dream study is an ancient science dating to at least 6,000 years ago when dreams perceived as messages from gods were written on the clay codas of Mesopotamia. For the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians it was necessary to distinguish between the “true dreams” of kings and priests (potential messages from god) and other “false dreams” reported even by women and children. Several thousand years later, Rene Descartes, focusing on methods of elucidating such “truths,” developed his scientific method while attempting to differentiate dreaming from external reality. At the turn of the twentieth century, Freud developed his psychoanalytic theories of mental functioning from his approach to dream interpretation. In the 1960s, the apparent realization that REM sleep (REMS) was dreaming destroyed 500 years of belief in Cartesian Dualism and led us into this modern age of unitary activation–synthesis theory. If REMS is dreaming, in neuro-scientific actuality, mind equals brain. The literature is replete with such grand theories purporting to explain the dream state, and it is only recently that experimentally testable scientific approaches have been applied to the study of dreaming. Now, most scientists and philosophers accept that research overwhelmingly demonstrates that REMS occurs without dreaming and dreaming without REMS. It is currently unclear as to how much of the highly developed REMS neurocognitive model presented in this book is applicable to the cognitive state of dreaming.