ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud claimed that dreams were attempts to fulfil peremptory wishes, arising during sleep, derived from appetitive urges. He based this claim on findings from a purely subjective method: he collected dreamers’ associations to the individual elements of their dreams and then inferred implicit, underlying themes from the converging semantic and affective links. The differences between the “manifest” and the “latent” content of dreams led Freud to infer an intervening process, by means of which the unconscious wishes could be transformed into conscious dreams. This intervening process was the so-called dream-work, which involved mechanisms such as “displacement”, condensation” and “regression.” The brain mechanisms of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep were laid bare in a succession of experiments performed mainly by M. Jouvet and J. A. Hobson: REM is switched on and off by a simple oscillatory mechanism located in a lowly part of the brainstem. This part of the brain has very little to do with mental life.
