Dreams as Fictional Remembering

ABSTRACT

During dreaming, the brain inhibits input from the senses and blocks motor output. The miracle is that, despite a lack of contact with the senses and a temporary paralysis, the brain continues to generate densely meaningful first-person scenarios. What justifies this purely imaginative procedure that leaves people so vulnerable to predators? A great deal of neuroanatomical evidence suggests that during REM sleep, the brain prunes exuberant synaptic connections. In so doing, the brain simplifies overly complex models of the world formed during the day to deal with noisy scenarios and renders them more generalizable to the future. Freud likened the mandate of dreaming to the task an illustrator faces in coming up with a single illustration to represent the day’s headlines. In my view, this process of condensation is not a method of disguise, as Freud believed, but the very function of dreaming, and it has a temporal signature. Dreams reveal and simplify past happenings by generating tight fictional narratives around similar schemas, exposing by analogy the deep invariant structures of the stories by which people organize their lives.