ABSTRACT
In the last 10 years, following widespread rejection of the approach provided by psychophysiological models (which assume direct correspondence between psychological and physiological indicators), research into the cognitive aspects of dreaming has generally focused on the specific components and strategies operating in dream production. While the overall perspective of such studies is clearly cognitive, it is often unclear which of the various models of cognitive processes in waking has been transposed to the context of sleep mentation. Therefore, even if there have been many more investigations of the cognitive components of dreams (or, in more general terms, mental sleep experiences: MSEs) than of the emotional-affective ones, any attempt to elaborate a general model of the cognitive aspects of MSE seems as yet too ambitious, given the difficulty of combining the evidence provided by different studies into a theoretically coherent framework (Cavallero & Cicogna, 1984).
