Dreams are the subjective experiences of imagery, narrative, thought, and emotion that occur during sleep, most vividly during rapid eye movement sleep but also in other sleep stages. They are typically involuntary and frequently characterised by altered logic, intense affect, and symbolic or bizarre content, and th…
Dreams are the subjective experiences of imagery, narrative, thought, and emotion that occur during sleep, most vividly during rapid eye movement sleep but also in other sleep stages. They are typically involuntary and frequently characterised by altered logic, intense affect, and symbolic or bizarre content, and their recall is generally fragmentary on waking. Scholarship on dreams spans several traditions that often differ in their basic claims about meaning. Neuroscientific accounts examine the brain activity that generates dreaming and treat dream content as related to memory consolidation, emotional processing, and the patterned activation of cortical and limbic networks during sleep. Psychological and psychoanalytic traditions, by contrast, interpret dreams as meaningful expressions of a person's inner conflicts, wishes, and emotional life, using them as material for clinical insight. Cultural, philosophical, and religious frameworks add further interpretive layers, assigning dreams significance within particular belief systems and worldviews, including theological perspectives that classify and ascribe meaning to dreaming. Within psychotherapy and mental health, attention to dreams can illuminate a patient's psychosocial state and serve as a route into thoughts and feelings that are otherwise difficult to access. Research methods range from sleep-laboratory recording and content analysis to qualitative and interpretive study, reflecting the topic's position at the intersection of biology, psychology, and culture.
5 peer-reviewed articles, ranked by relevance. Each links to its DOI.
The 5 articles above have been cited 46 times in the scholarly literature. Citation data via OpenAlex and Crossref, updated Jun 2026.
A sample of recent works citing this journal's research on Dreams, linking to each citing work.