ABSTRACT
Computer dream theories, an offshoot of information processing models, appear to provide a particularly fresh meta-psychological viewpoint. This chapter briefly reviews some of the major thrusts of these models and then applies the theories to clinical data from several multiple personality and dissociative patients. In a study of the dreams of depressed and non-depressed women, she presents data demonstrating the adaptive function of dreaming when affect is at a moderate level. Peterfreund, like Hartmann, argues that fewer programs are available during sleep to process information, thus producing the bizarre quality of dreams. Some brief excerpts of dream work with several dissociated patients are presented following some brief background on multiple personality disorder. Dreams, then are not simply biologically driven by products of cortical stimulation but largely unconscious mechanisms with a self curative programming function analogous to other unconscious physical body healing systems.
