One possible function of sleep: to produce dreams

Among the various functions of sleep, one is particularly significant for our mental life: that of producing dreams. This specifically human experience, which takes place only during sleep, is closely related with neurophysiological events. The coincidence between mental and biological events raises a complex epistemological question concerning the close relationship between dreams, viewed as a subjective experience and sleep, viewed as a vegetative experience which is possible to define from a behavioural, electrical, neurochemical and neurobiological viewpoint. In this presentation, the author criticizes Hobson and McCarley's internal generator theory, according to which the pons activates the limbic structures responsible for the recovery of memory in dreams, on account of physiological and psychological reasons. The author puts forward a cognitive hypothesis, which considers dreams as a symbolic process of elaborating, interpreting and reorganizing in narrative sequences all the material accumulated in the memory during waking hours. The author proposes, therefore, a psychoanalytical model of dreaming, in which dreams constitute a way of representing the individual's inner world with internal objects related with one another and with the Self.