You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
During the last fifteen years there has been a huge amount of research in a field now known as 'sleep and dreaming' or 'the
biology of dreaming'. The D-state (desynchronized sleep or REM sleep), the physiological state concomitant with most dreaming in man, is recognized as a distinct organismic or behavioral state probably present in all mammalian species. Its study has led to advances in neurophysiology and neurochemistry far removed from its relationship with dreaming. My own view is that this work, though currently chiefly chemical and physiological in its orientation, is immensely important for human psychology since hopefully it is studying the physiology of primitive or primary process thinking.
Along with this development, or perhaps despite it, there have existed a number of researchers whose interests lay in studying the dream itself rather than its biology—a perfectly natural interest, yet somehow these researchers have felt swamped, or left out, and have become increasingly defensive. It has become impossible to hear a paper from a member of this group without hearing a lengthy apology including either a quote from Seymour Kety, 'We may soon have a biology of thinking but not a biology of thoughts' modified to 'a biology of dreaming but not of dreams', or a quote from Allan Rechtschaffen, 'We are in danger of learning a lot of biology without knowing what it is the biology of', or both. Since this group of researchers is prominent among the authors of the present volume and the organizers of the symposium on which it is based, I approached the book with some trepidation, fearing that I would be reading a long, sincere, but totally unnecessary defense of an interest in studying the dream. Although there are hints of this attitude here and there, this collection itself turns out to be much more positive.
The book begins with the traditional physiological chapter, by Frederick Snyder. This is followed by a number of different viewpoints on the psycho