Experimental Research on Dreaming: State of the Art and Neuropsychoanalytic Perspectives

Abstract

Dreaming is still a mystery of human cognition, although it has been studied experimentally for more than a century. Experimental psychology first investigated dream content and frequency. The neuroscientific approach to dreaming arose at the end of the 1950s and soon proposed a physiological substrate of dreaming: rapid eye movement sleep. Fifty years later, this hypothesis was challenged because it could not explain all of the characteristics of dream reports. Therefore, the neurophysiological correlates of dreaming are still unclear, and many questions remain unresolved. Do the representations that constitute the dream emerge randomly from the brain, or do they surface according to certain parameters? Is the organization of the dream’s representations chaotic or is it determined by rules? Does dreaming have a meaning? What is/are the function(s) of dreaming? Psychoanalysis provides hypotheses to address these questions. Until now, these hypotheses have received minimal attention in cognitive neuroscience, but the recent development of neuropsychoanalysis brings new hopes of interaction between the two fields. Considering the psychoanalytical perspective in cognitive neuroscience would provide new directions and leads for dream research and would help to achieve a comprehensive understanding of dreaming. Notably, several subjective issues at the core of the psychoanalytic approach, such as the concept of personal meaning, the concept of unconscious episodic memory and the subject’s history, are not addressed or considered in cognitive neuroscience. This paper argues that the focus on singularity and personal meaning in psychoanalysis is needed to successfully address these issues in cognitive neuroscience and to progress in the understanding of dreaming and the psyche.

Dreaming and insight

“…Interestingly, the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, whose activity is modified during sleep and is enhanced before cognitive insight during wakefulness (Darsaud et al, 2011), shows increased activity in REM sleep compared to NREM sleep (for a review, see Ruby, 2011). As a consequence, one may expect that REM dreams could be more supportive of insight than NREM dreams.…”

Alpha reactivity to first names differs in subjects with high and low dream recall frequency

“…Indeed, very little is known about the psychological mechanisms constraining dream content and about the cerebral mechanisms involved in the production and encoding of the oneiric representations (Nir and Tononi, 2010; Ruby, 2011; De Gennaro et al, 2012; Perogamvros and Schwartz, 2012). …”

What would be the benefits of a collaboration between psychoanalysis and cognitive neuroscience? The opinion of a neuroscientist

“…One cannot expect to propose a comprehensive theory of the human mind if neglecting these issues. A collaboration with psychoanalysis, which could be considered as a “science” of singularity, appears then providential to help finding solutions to address private issues in cognitive neuroscience (Ruby, 2011). …”