Phenomenology of Dreaming

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One might have thought that, more than forty years after the discovery of REM sleep and its relationship to dreaming, we would already have an adequate description of the dream experience.

They argue that, to obtain a truly representative sample of dreams, it is necessary to collect dream reports systematically in the laboratory.

Because, even in the laboratory, there is no direct access to the dream experience, the authors are explicit about their dependence on the recall and report of the dream for our knowledge of it.

Strauch and Meier call attention to a number of different approaches to this problem: (a) typological description, (b) enumeration, (c) describing dream interactions, and (d) portraying dream situations, themes, and motives.

They underscore that simply enumerating the features of a dream or dream series does not address the process of dreaming.

By this they mean the "what" of dream experience: the sensations, thoughts, emotions, and presentational mode (e.g., bizarreness) of the dream.

They find that sensations, i.e., visual, auditory, and bodily phenomena, are...

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