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In science, there is always the choice of how wide an area to investigate. If our gaze is too wide, we may get lost and miss important details. If our gaze is too narrow, we may see some details well but miss the big picture. The definition of confabulation adopted initially by DeLuca from Moscovitch and Melo (1997) is very broad: “statements or actions that involve unintentional but obvious distortions.…” But having subscribed to such a sweeping definition, DeLuca then narrows his gaze by some selections that seem arbitrary. He eschews confabulation in dreams and schizophrenia rather summarily, even though they arguably fit into his definition of broad sense confabulation while also sharing certain significant characteristics of narrow sense confabulation.
Like Solms, I would prefer to keep dreams and schizophrenia in our consideration, at least to start, and examine the phenomenology of all confabulations as thoroughly as possible. When we have specified the differences between all kinds of confabulation and the significant dimensions involved, we will be in a better position to categorize confabulations and refine our model of the way or ways that confabulation can occur.
In our dreams, we are all confabulators-we work out stories that never happened, although, as with waking confabulation in those who are brain in jured, many elements of the story can be based on actual experiences drawn from different time periods in our lives.
Even in nonpsychoanalytic approaches to dreaming, there is much to be learned from a comparison of dreams and waking confabulation. For example, Hobson and McCarley's (1977) activation-synthesis hypothesis of dreaming is very much about confabulation. In their model, the pons produces an image or a set of images, and the cortex invents a story based on them (i.e., confabulates). As I have noted (Blechner, 1998), it is like a brain administering a TAT to itself, which is, in effect, a model of intrapsychic confabulation.
In recent years, I ha