A cognitive-psychological model of REM dream production

Abstract

Based on the methodological assumption that cognitive-psychological study of dream processes (psychoneirics) can be pursued in like manner as in cognitive-psychological study of speech processes (psycholinguistics) and on the substantive assumption that speech and dreaming may share some common production routines, a cognitive-psychological model of dream formation is proposed. A generalized psycholinguistic model of speech production is presented, and then each sequential stage of that model is examined for its aptness to the process of dream production. It is concluded that there are major differences between speech and dream production at both the input and the output levels (message formulation in the linguistic sense is absent in the instigation of the dream; the dream itself is a multimodal perceptual simulation), but it is proposed that midrange stages of speech and dream production may be largely identical. This model is shown to be consistent with various formal properties of the dream, including its central paradox of controlled formal organization in the face of contents that may be "senseless," trivial, or obscure. The model also is shown to suggest several new research paradigms that might be employed both to test its own utility and to generate data more generally relevant to the question of how mental functions are organized during rapid eye movement sleep.