The connection between dreaming, the brain and mental functioning: where are we now?

Abstract

Dreaming has always aroused our curiosity. Theories as to the cause and function of dreams have been described since the beginning of recorded history (George 2020). In the late 19th century, experimental psychologists and psychologically-minded researchers from other disciplines made important methodological contibutions, emptical observations, and conceptual developments to the study of dreams (e.g., Jastrow, 1888; Manacéïne, 1897; De Sanctis, 1899; Vold, 1897). At the end of the 19th century, Mary Whiton Calkins and her female students made pioneering advancements in the psychological science of dreams (Calkins 1893; Weed et al. 1896). Freud’s psychoanalytic theory soon overshadowed these groundbreaking empirical works as the interpretation of dream content and their presumed reflections of the unconscious mind became the focus. The detection of rapid eye movements during sleep in 1953 and the suggestion that dreams occurred exclusively during this newly defined sleep state electrified the field of dream research (Aserinsky and Kleitman 1953; Dement and Kleitman 1957). Although eye movements (Ladd, 1892), increased brain pulsations (Mosso, 1881), and electroencephalographic patterns (Loomis et al., 1937; Davis et al., 1938) had been previously argued to empirically correspond to dreaming, this discovery catalyzed the first “Meeting of Researchers in the Field of EEG and Dreams” at the University of Chicago in 1961 organized by psychologist Allan Rechtschaffen (Association for the Psychophysiological Study of Sleep Records). Renamed the Annual Meeting of the Association of the Psychophysiological Study of Sleep in subsequent years, these early meetings consisted principally of psychiatrists and psychologists, most of whom with interests in dream research. Among them, John Antrobus, Rosalind Cartwright, G. William Domhoff, David Foulkes, Donald R. Goodenough, Calvin S. Hall, Ernest Hartmann and Joe Kamiya, made valuable contributions to our understanding of dreaming through decades of psychological research (Antrobus, 1992; Domhoff and Kamyia, 1964; Ellman and Antrobus, 1991; Foulkes, 1966, 1985; Goodenough et al., 1965; Hall and Van de Castle, 1966; Hartmann, 2010). While David Foulkes tirelessly advocated for his vision of a descriptive and explanitory dream psychology, Rosalind Cartwright developed an applied vision for the field outlining over 100 dream-related questions that remain pertinent to sleep psychology (Cartwright 1977, 1978, 2010). With the rise of sleep medicine and the vicissitudes of funding, dream research drifted to the fringe of sleep research by the end of the 1980s (Foulkes 1996). Nevertheless, dreaming remains a central topic of sleep psychology, and many questions remain to be answered.