ABSTRACT
In the mid-1950s, Eugene Aserinsky made the serendipitous discovery that periods of rapid eye movements (REMs) during sleep were correlated with dreaming. Other objective indicators of dreaming were soon recognized, including short-wave EEG’s, motor inhibition, and genital arousal. Non-REM (NREM) sleep is not devoid of dreaming, however. Gradually, the REM = Dreaming consensus unraveled, with the neuropsychoanlayst Mark Solms demonstrating that dreams and REM’s could be doubly-dissociated. More recently, a “hot-zone” of dreaming has been identified (e.g., Giulio Tononi, Francesca Siclari) in which EEG activity in the posterior cortex indicates dreaming, whether the subject is in REM or NREM sleep. Allan Hobson, an originator of the activation-synthesis hypothesis, which led many to view dreams as random phenomena, eventually claimed he had been “misunderstood,” although he continued to insist on the “transparency” of dreams (no latent contents) and to challenge the scientific status of personal meanings in dreams. Dreaming may be viewed as paradoxical (after Michael Jouvet) in that during dreaming the brain exhibits contradictory tendencies, with some subsystems being inhibited (e.g., the cognitively advanced DLPFC) and others, activated (e.g., the limbic system). An exciting neuroscience development (Reichle, Snyder, and others) is the discovery of a “neural default network,” which becomes active with the cessation of directed task-activity and is associated with mind-wandering, imagery, daydreaming, and dreaming—release-phenomena, which come into play by dint of release from inhibition and control (a quintessential focus of psychoanalysis).
