ABSTRACT
Dreaming, whatever else it may be, is surely a cognitive process. The classical concern with whether and how dreams might have symbolic meanings that are open to interpretation requires a cognitive psychology of dreaming. On the one hand, the story-like, dramatic cohesion of dreams may be taken as the core of the creative dream process. On the other hand, some investigators, and most clinically based approaches to dream interpretation, have been more impressed by predominantly visual forms of dream bizarreness. Dreaming may be understood as necessarily a form of imagination. Dream bizarreness, or what might be called "hallucinatory" features of dreaming, is sometimes seen as a non-cognitive disruption in the narrative core of dream experience-directly caused by the phasic discharge activities of the pontine formation responsible for initiating rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. The most striking form of dream bizarreness consists in unlikely or impossible events intruding on an otherwise generally plausible dream setting.
