ABSTRACT
There is potential confusion between a psychopathology of dreams and dreams in a psychopathologic state. The former refers to alternations in the dreaming process that may be seen as abnormal, whereas the latter refers to the dreams that are the concomitants of a mental disorder. A dream that awakens the dreamer in a terrified state generally with accompanying frightening dream content, a nightmare, would be a psychopathologic dream. A dream report from a patient suffering from schizophrenia would be a dream from a person in a psychopathologic state. The dream may or may not be unique, either pathonomonically or statistically, to that state. Strangers occurring more frequently in the dreams of schizophrenics than in normal or depressed individuals are a statistical change in dream content in a psychopathologic condition (Kramer, Baldridge, Whitman, Ornstein, & Smith, 1969)
