Bizarreness in dreams and fantasies: Implications for the activation-synthesis hypothesis

✍ Scribed by Julie Williams; Jane Merritt; Cindi Rittenhouse; J.Allan Hobson

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1992
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 1002 KB
• Volume: 1
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1053-8100
• DOI: 10.1016/1053-8100(92)90059-j

✦ Synopsis

Dreaming is a statistically robust cognitive correlate of REM sleep, but all of its formal features may occur in other states of sleep and even in waking, especially during fantasy. In order to test the hypothesis that the brain basis of such cognitive features as dream bizarreness is to be found in REM sleep neurophysiology, it is critical to quantify bizarreness in dreams and other mental states and to analyze the data with respect to both the magnitude and the kind of bizarreness so measured. Any differences in the cognitive dimensions are candidate correlates of REM sleep neurophysiology. Sixty pairs of home-based dream and fantasy reports were collected from 12 subjects and scored for bizarreness using a two-stage scoring system adapted from Hobson, Hoffman, Helfand, and Kostner (1987). Our results show that bizarreness was twice as prevalent in dream reports as in wake-state fantasy reports of the same subjects. Further analysis of the reports also showed differences in other features including the number of persona and remoteness of time and plaCe.