ABSTRACT
Sometimes dreams seem to condense large amounts of information into short lessons or parables. A dream is evidence of the brain–mind's attempt to continue working on leftover, residual, incomplete thinking processes. A dream, like all thinking, is in part a product of spreading neuronal activation. A cognitive, information processing approach to dreams is not inconsistent with either Jungian or Freudian ideas. Dreaming promotes felicitous alignment between a person's body and mind. Dreaming is in the service of controlling and expanding the validity of thoughts thereby allowing for greater feelings of pleasure in life. Depending on a dreamer's current state, optimal control may call for sympathetic stimulation and/or parasympathetic down-regulation of information processing operations. Dreaming is involved with attempts to encode and store new information into the existing structure of semantic concepts in the brain, and to encode and store procedural habits to activate concepts.
