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In this paper I will describe a number of experimental strategies that my colleagues and I have been using over the years for the study of dreaming. I will describe them from the point of view of self psychology.
What appeals to me about self psychology is, among other things, that its formulations do not depend on physiological models of the nervous system. They are purely psychological in nature and are applicable to a wide spectrum of clinical phenomena. In fact, I am convinced that a marriage between dream research and self psychology will produce a healthy offspring.
It is a peculiar historical anomaly that even though sleep research has made a profound impact on clinical practice, dream research has had remarkably little influence on clinical activity. This is partly because the dream researcher has been so obsessed with reducing everything to biological processes that he has come to look at the dream pretty much as a marginal, even discardable, epiphenomenon. Thus, a huge gap separates the dream researcher from the clinician (Fiss, 1984, 1986). It is as though we have lost sight of the fact that it is not brains that dream but people.
However, the gap is not unbridgeable. It is possible to do dream research that is both scientifically sound and clinically relevant. But it has to be research that uses psychological constructs for theorizing and that studies dreaming as a psychological event in its own right, independent of its underlying neurophysiology. A scientist looking