Do dreams really guard sleep? Evidence for and against Freud's theory of the basic function of dreaming

“A dream is invariably an attempt to get rid of a disturbance of sleep by means of a wish-fullfilment, so that the dream is a guardian of sleep”. Sigmund Freud (1940/1953) According to the classic theory framed by Sigmund Freud, the basic and teleological function of dreaming is to protect sleep from disruption (Freud, 1900/1953); a quite rational hypothesis since sleep constitutes a vital need for living species (Kryger et al., 2011). This aspect of Freud's dream model—which as a whole is considered as the initial cornerstone of psychoanalysis (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988)—leads to two empirically testable conjectures, thus allowing its scientific examination: (1) arousal during sleep triggers dreaming; and (2) non-dreaming causes sleep disruption. We review here the experimental, medical, and neuropsychological data which allow testing these two conjectures; in this paper, the term “significant” denotes statistical significance at the p < 0.05 level.

• Publication year

  2013

• Venue

  Front. Psychology

• Publication date

  2013-01-30

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00017PMID 23386839PMCID 3558686
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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