The Reactive Nature of Dreaming

The dream experience is an organized event as reflected in the fact that psychologically different groups have different dream experiences. The nature of those differences implies but does not demonstrate that the dream is responding to psychologically meaningful experiences rather than just being a concomitant of them. We want to explore more specifically whether the dream experience is responsive to external events or is essentially so stable, at least in the adult, as to be endlessly repetitive. By postulating a strict biological determinism, Hobson and colleagues (Hobson, Pace-Schott, & Stickgold, 2000) maintain that it is the random neural signals from the pontine centers that is determining of the content of the dream experience. Domhoff (Domhoff, 1996), in emphasizing the constancy of dream themes across the adult life span and in advocating the use of content norms derived from college age subjects in studies of adult dreaming and describing what he believes to be a neglected aspect of dreaming, the repetition dimension, implies that the reactive nature of dreaming, if it exists, is of less importance than the stability or impenetrability of dreaming.