Physical motion in dreams: One measure of three theories.

As a normal psychological event, dreaming is an object of fascination and of conflicting explanation. In biopsychological terms, this article compares 3 explanations of 1 salient feature of dream cognition. Physical movement can be measured in dream reports, can be understood in physiologic terms, and can provide a focus for comparing dream theories. In addition, dreamed motion may have functional importance. The authors discuss dream motor data that conflict with Freud's explanation of dream movement and with a distributed activation explanation but coincide with an activation synthesis hypothesis. Because physiologic models of sleep intersect with physiologic models of psychopathology, this approach may be relevant to psychopathological dreaming. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)