Finding the stuff that dreams are made of.

Abstract

The scientific study of dreams has had a long but tortured history. While the discovery of REM sleep in 1953 and its strong correlation with dreaming led to a renewed hope that the study of dreaming could be moved to a solidly scientific and physiological base, such studies have provided only mixed success. In 1977, Hobson and McCarley proposed the activation-synthesis model for dream construction based on the physiological features of REM sleep, but since then the field has shown surprisingly little progress.