ABSTRACT
Dreaming has a necessary psychological function and every one dreams at regular intervals throughout sleep. This kind of dreaming is therefore a kind of thinking whose value, like that of a prophet in his own land, is often disregarded. Recordings of brain electrical activity in sleeping volunteers who spent their nights in 'sleep laboratories' revealed a lot of the neural basis of dreaming. In psychotherapy, dreams have a privileged status because they can give both patient and therapists access to the various unconscious thoughts and impulses active in the patient's mind and which play such a part in shaping his or her behaviour. In other patients or in other dreams, the way in which the dream is told, or the use to which it is put in a psychotherapy session, may be more significant than the detail of the content. Woken dreamers report dreams on successive nights that show thematic consistency and development.
