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“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” (Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene I)
The explosion of discoveries in neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience has brought to the forefront the age-old question of how the mind brain can be understood scientifically. The same puzzles of understanding consciousness, dreaming, and the trance state confront us now as they did Freud in his early career in neurology during the 1890's. During the past decade there has been a convergence of data about the source and meaning of dreams emanating from the sleep laboratory, clinical neuropsychiatry, cognitive neurosciences, clinical psychology, and psychoanalysis. (Fosshage, 1997). The fundamental principle emerging from all areas supports the idea that dreams are both a psychological and biological integrative, adaptive, and self-regulatory process reflecting the information-processing and affect-regulating functions of the brain. Important contributions supporting this principle will here be delineated and discussed.
I would first like to highlight a clinical case in order to demonstrate the interpersonal communicative process function of the dream, as distinguished from dream-content analysis, as I believe these process issues are fundamental to our understanding of biological and psychological functions of the dream. Early in my psychiatric career, I worked with a young man whose primary mode of in-depth communications occurred in six noninterpreted dreams during the course of a two-year psychotherapy. These dreams were the primary markers of the patient's existential experience and the state of the integration of his sense of self. They also were powerful organizers of the therapist's behavior and sense of purpose during the initial anxiety-filled, despairing, and occasionally exhilarating experience of sitting with the patient. This therapeutic experience left me in awe of the power of dreams to both communicate and organize the in