ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the current state of knowledge and opinion concerning the psychophysiological study of dreams, dreaming, and dreamers. This can be done simply and briefly. There is an emerging consensus that the scientific study of dreams has not lived up to the potential that motivated much of the research following the discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep in 1953. Mental activity and subjective experience can be regarded as isomorphic with brain activity, epiphenomenal to brain activity, or as an independent domain which interacts causally with brain activity. Electrophysiological correlates of sleep mentation have generally fallen into three categories: phasic events, asymmetries of hemispheric activation, and tonic electroencephalography (EEG) characteristics. Most of the traditions of Western science simply dismissed lucid dreaming as irrelevant or, worse, denied its existence. The concept of stage is the centerpiece of the conceptual and empirical methods of dream psychophysiology.
