ABSTRACT

It is crucial in our exploration of the dream experience to raise questions about the orderliness or regularity of dreaming. If the dream is viewed as the unique personal experience of the individual, variability would be potentially so great that studying dreaming would really not be possible and, at best, we could only study the dreams of a particular individual. This has been the traditional scientific view of the dream that has rejected any scientific attempt at its study. In its extreme form the dream experience is described as a type of delirium or dementia in which the mind-brain is making the best of a bad job trying to organize the psychological output of a set of random stimuli coming from the subcortical pontine center (Hobson, 1988). The search for the structure and meaning of dreaming is a fruitless endeavor if psychological dreaming is a disorganized state, chaotic, and essentially random. The dream must be signal rather than noise, patterned rather than chaotic, stable rather than unstable, to support the possibility of scientific study.