ABSTRACT
Dreaming continues the process of creating, altering and repeating narratives that are "the building blocks of the development of the human psyche". Considerable empirical evidence indicates that dreaming, especially REM dreaming, is required neurophysiologically and psychologically for its organizing, regulatory and restorative functions. This chapter illustrates the developmental and regulatory functions with a brief, yet powerful, dream narrative. Dreaming and waking cognition utilize imagistic and verbal symbolic modes. The chapter explains Freud's primary and secondary processes as imagistic and verbal symbolic modes of encoding and processing respectively. The evidence indicates that the formation of narratives in REM dreams and in REM-like activity during waking states in periods of daydreaming, reverie and the wandering mind provide regulatory functions that are essential for maintaining neurophysiological and psychological equilibrium. As with waking cognition, the dream narrative varies across a wide spectrum in formulation, coherence and specificity from the well formulated to the unformulated and inchoate processes.
