How are dreams made? Towards a computational model.

Abstract

In order to account for how dreams are made, both information structures and energy systems must be made more explicit. This paper attempts to spell out in more detail two of the three components that Foulkes postulated as essential to dream construction, namely, memory and planning. It draws on the mechanisms in Mueller's computational model of human daydreaming, in particular, a planner--which consists of personal goals, daydreaming goals, and planning and inference rules for a particular domain--and a set of emotions that determine the choice of daydreaming goals. We analyzed the laboratory REM dream of an adult male subject in terms of the three kinds of goals in Mueller's model: namely, the personal goals that derive form the day residue elicited from the subject prior to the dream; the dream goals of reversal, rehearsal, rationalization, and revenge; and the planning goals or script identified in a metaphoric problem space. The sequence of scenes from the script determines the skeletal structure of the dream, and the emotion of humiliation, decomposed into embarrassment and anger, largely determines the choice of dream goals. Much of the dream content itself is the instantiation of an inference rule for restoring social esteem. Finally, it is argued that the kind and quantity of mechanisms that are postulated by Mueller for human daydreaming are also necessary to account for basic processes of night dream construction.