ABSTRACT
Distinguishing between nightmares, existential dreams, and transcendent dreams invites reconsideration of both dream formation and dream function. A comprehensive theory of dreaming would move beyond traumatic stress and threat and fear to address the distinctive effects of loss and sadness, as well as the distinctive effects of ascent and ecstasy. Nielsen and Levin emphasize that dreaming reflects the construction of extinction memories through which fear memories, including their emotional concomitants, become inhibited. Even without denying the importance of posttraumatic dreams and nightmares, the preceding models overemphasize traumatic distress and potentially overlook the influence of other emotion-coordinating systems on dreaming and dream function. The role of hyperarousal in dreams involving traumatic distress is differentiable from the role of separation distress in the generation of very differently expressive dream patterns. In general, a contrasting polythetic approach to definitional specificity has guided the emergence of biological taxonomies and perhaps should be considered in attempts to attain definitional precision in dream studies.
