Bottom-up or top-down in dream neuroscience? A top-down critique of two bottom-up studies

Recent neuroscientific studies of dreaming, specifically those in relation to waking sensory-motor impairments, but also more generally, betray a faulty understanding of the sort of process that dreaming is. They adhere to the belief that dreaming is a bottom-up phenomenon, whose form and content is dictated by sensory-motor brain stem activity, rather than a top-down process initiated and controlled by higher-level cognitive systems. But empirical data strongly support the latter alternative, and refute the conceptualization and interpretation of recent studies of dreaming in sensory-motor impairment in particular and of recent dream neuroscience in general.