ABSTRACT
The existence of the dreaming experience is implicit in a work that intends to explore the structure, function, and meaning of dreams. To question whether dreams actually occur during sleep and are experienced as an event extended in time seems a gratuitous undertaking. It has already been pointed out that some of the earliest written records (Van de Castle, 1994), the Beatty Papyrus from Egypt and the Gilgamesh legend from Mesopotamia, refer directly to dreaming, as does the Old and New Testament, the Koran, the Indian sacred texts, the Buddhist legends about the dreams of the Buddha’s mother, and the revelation that came to Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. In the philosophical world from ancient Greece, Aristotle and Plato, to Emanuel Kant in the 18th century, the experiential nature of dreaming has been accepted (Freud, 1955). In the scientific world, the commitment to the idea of the existence of the experience of dreaming is universal, confirmed in the work of Freud and the many predecessors he cites going back to the Greek physicians such as Hippocrates and the priests of the Asklepian temples (Meier, 1966). The extensive laboratory study of dreaming was initiated by Aserinsky, Kleitman, and Dement in the 1950s with their observations of a portion of sleep with rapid synchronous eye movements, the so-called REM sleep, during which dreaming was thought to occur (Aserinsky & Kleitman, 1953; Dement & Wolpert, 1958). In the 21st century, Reiser (Reiser, 2001), a noted psychobiologic researcher proposed “…a preliminary psychobiologic concept of the dream process.…”
