ABSTRACT
This study began with the observation that certain neurological patients com plained of specific changes in their dreams, the onset of which they dated to the beginning of their illness. I said at the outset that I considered this obser vation to be a simple clinical fact, as deserving of serious attention as any other. I argued that there was no a priori reason to doubt the veracity of these patients’ reports nor the reality of the experiences they described. I suggested that we should treat their reports as we would any other clinical complaint, and then attempt to discover whether or not they displayed a degree of uni formity and whether or not typical subjective descriptions co-occurred with particular clinical presentations and pathological-anatomical findings. Only then, I argued, would it be possible for us to form a considered opinion on the scientific value of such reports.
