Dreaming and Waking Cognition

Dreams are often believed to be “symbolic” and thus categorically distinct from the “ordinary” thoughts of waking cognition. But to the contrary, emerging evidence suggests that dreams and waking cognition share a common origin at the neurobiological level, which is reflected in similarity of form, content, and function at the phenomenological level. In both dreams and daydreams, memories of the past form the basis of novel imaginary scenarios. Neural networks that support remembering the past, imagining the future, and creating fictitious scenes remain active across conscious states of wake and sleep. Taken together, this evidence suggests that dreaming is a natural extension of waking conscious experience. This empirically supported conception of dreaming has important clinical applications concerning the “interpretability” of dreams in the therapeutic setting.