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This book is a reprint of Vol. 7, No. 2 and No. 3 of the Journal of Mind and Behavior. It provides a rich survey of the complex, bewildering state of current experimental dream research. This area is apparently divided into a number of different approaches that have little or nothing to do with each other. Editor Haskell makes three attempts to sort out the field, but finally gives up and says someone else should do this (p. 223).
All agree that Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1900/1965) is the starting point for modern dream research, but attitudes to Freud vary from rejection, to putting aside as different, to careful evaluation and correction, to building on Freud's or Kohut's ideas. A second landmark was the 1953 discovery of REM sleep by Aserinsky and Kleitman. This discovery opened the door to the experimental study of dreams, because dream reports occurred when people were wakened from REM sleep. Then it turned out that people also dreamed after a fashion in non-REM periods, and things started getting complicated.
According to Haskell, researchers began to distinguish between dreams and dreaming, or sleep mentation, as a way of distancing themselves from psychoanalytic theory. Dream research treats a dream as a message or trace from the unconscious mind and tries to induce the specific mental characteristics that produced the dream—the meaning. Dreaming research tries to describe the general processes that occur during dreaming, whether neural,