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Dreaming as Cognition. Edited by C. Cavallero & D. Foulkes. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 1993. Pp. ix+141. Paper, 13.95.
The Functions of Dreaming. Edited by A. Moffitt, M. Kramer & R. Hoffman. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 1993. Pp. x + 610. Cased, $59.50; paper, $19.95.
The Dream Discourse Today. Edited by S. Flanders. London: Routledge. 1993. Pp. viii+237. Cased, 335.00; paper, 14.99.
Cavallero & Foulkes aim to show the relevance of cognitive psychology to the scientific study of dreaming and of dreaming to cognitive psychology. They claim that dreams employ the same systems of mental representation and processing as are used in waking life, and certainly sleep laboratory sampling of dreams has shown them usually to be organized narratives, plausible and realistic rather than bizarre. They suggest that cognitive psychologists have ignored the phenomenon of dreaming because they have concentrated upon investigating ordered, directed and rational thinking, using paradigms in which input stimuli are immediate and controlled, and because of the de-emphasis of introspection and self-reports. Also, with the discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep in the 1950s, the study of dreaming was mainly left to psychophysiologists. Cavallero & Foulkes argue that the physiological reductionist project for dreaming has failed (for example, dreaming also occurs in nonREM sleep), and that cognitive psychologists should be addressing the formation and reporting of dreams.
Their introduction provides a brief overview of scientific research into dreaming. Kerr's chapter reviews neuropsychological evidence on the covariation of dreams and waking imagery deficits following brain injury or blindness and individual-differences data on the relationship between the frequency of dream recall and the vividness of waking mental imagery. Cavallero & Cicogna review studies of the effects on dreams of pre-sleep stimulation (for example, by films or thirst). Because these are only unreliably incorporated into dreams, they adopt a different methodology in which subjects are asked to free-associate to the thematic elements of their dreams. Cavallero & Cicogna claim, as did Freud, that these free associations indicate the mnemonic sources of the dream. These memories are then classified as episodic, semantic or abstract self-references. In this manner, they have found differences in mnemonic sources between reports of sleep onset dreams, REM dreams and non-REM dreams; for example, sleep onset...