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Mancia discusses the view that dreaming is an instinctual activity, a view which ethologists, neurophysiologists, and psychologists have come to advocate. Yet the picture of dreaming as instinctual behavior is incomplete, and we are dealing with a number of hypotheses on the realization of instinctual behavior during sleep. Mancia reviews the ethological and neurophysiological aspects of dreaming, as well as the data from experimental psychology and psychoanalysis. He advances the hypothesis that sleep is a particular instinctive activity in which there are alternative rhythmic appetitive and consummatory phases in regular and characteristic sequence for each individual. He links the narcissistic libido of the newborn to the REM sleep which dominates the neurophysiological functioning of the first period of growth. The sleep of the newborn represents a state of absolute narcissism, autoerotism, and omnipotence. Mancia claims that the advancing developmental process and the progressive formation of object relations bring about a progressive abandonment of this narcissistic position, parallel to a reduction in sleep in general and REM sleep in particular.