Sleep, 5(2): 169-187

© 1982 Raven Press, New York

A Cognitive-Psychological Model of REM

Dream Production

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David Foulkes

Emory University and Georgia Mental Health Institute, Atlanta, Georgia

Summary: Based on the methodological assumption that cognitive-psycho-

logical study of dream processes (psychoneirics) can be pursued in like manner
as is cognitive-psychological study of speech processes (psycho linguistics )
and on the substantive assumption that speech and dreaming may share some
common production routines, a cognitive-psychological model of dream for-
mation is proposed. A generalized psycho linguistic model of speech pro-
duction is presented, and then each sequential stage of that model is examined
for its aptness to the process of dream production. It is concluded that there are
major differences between speech and dream production at both the input and
the output levels (message formulation in the linguistic sense is absent in the
instigation of the dream; the dream itself is a multi modal perceptual simula-
tion), but it is proposed that midrange stages of speech and dream production
may be largely identical. This model is shown to be consistent with various
fonnal properties of the dream, including its central paradox of controlled
fonnal organization in the face of contents that may be .. senseless," trivial, or
obscure. The model also is shown to suggest several new research paradigms
that might be employed both to test its own utility and to generate data more
generally relevant to the question of how mental functions are organized during
rapid eye movement sleep. Key Words: Dream formation-Cognitive
psychology-Psycholinguistics-Dream theory-Psychoneirics.

I propose a model of rapid eye movement (REM) dream formation that is meant
to be consistent both with the evidence of empirical dream study and with data
and models from other cognitive-science disciplines. Evidence from these latter
disciplines is relevant to dream production because REM dreaming is a skilled
cognitive act, in which memories and knowledge are reprocessed, leading to the
generation of consciously apprehended and generally well-organized dream nar-
ratives. The data and models of cognitive science should be useful in modeling
REM dream production because cognitive psychologists, much more than dream
psychologists, have studied systematically the processes underlying complex
symbolic acts. Dream psychologists seem more often to have focused on the

Accepted for publication December 1981.

Address correspondence and reprint requests to Dr. Foulkes at Georgia Mental Health Institute,
1256 Briarcliff Road, Atlanta, Georgia 30306.

169
170 D. FOULKES

immensely more difficult, and perhaps impossibie, task of accounting for the
specific contents of a symbolic act.
The model proposed here can be viewed as a first effort to stake out the bound-
aries of a discipline I shall call psychoneirics. The discipline is defined as the
cognitive-psychological study of the processes of dreaming, and it is meant to
stand in relation to dream phenomena as psycholinguistics does to linguistic
phenomena. As is true of psycholinguistic models of speech production, a

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psychoneiric model of dream production will share the information-processing
approach of cognitive psychology more generally. That is, the form of the dream
production model will include the segregation of subprocesses, or stages of infor-
mation processing, and the model will propose a hypothetical sequence of the
operation of these subprocesses or stages that is meant to correspond to the
real-time internal processing that occurs during the act of dreaming.
The particular model proposed here will draw heavily on real or supposed
analogies between dreaming and speech production; that is, it articulates most
strongly with that branch of cognitive psychology which studies the human use of
linguistic symbols. In drawing analogies between dreaming and speaking, how-
ever, I am not implying that dreaming is (or involves) language, in the sense in
which that term is used in linguistics (cf. O. The model is not based on linguistic
formalisms, but rather on borrowings from psycholinguistics. These borrowings
are motivated by the hypothesis that, whatever their abstract similarities and
differences, dreaming and language may share a common real-time production
system.
My purposes in formulating the model are (a) to summarize and organize em-
pirical data relevant to dream production; (b) to provide a concrete basis by which
workers in the conceptually interrelated disciplines of dream psychology and
(waking) cognitive psychology can begin thinking about one another's problems
within the coordinates of the same language and the same sorts of experimental
and observational methods; and (c) to direct attention to new kinds of empirical
observations which can be made to test the model and, more generally, to enhance
understanding of the organization of mental functions during sleep, particularly
REM sleep.
Speech production and dream production. I begin by reviewing the kind of
model that has been proposed by psycholinguists for speech production and the
kinds of evidence on which this model is based; then I will ask to what degree this
model might also usefully be considered as the basis of a dream-production model.
My assessment of the psycholinguistic case is based largely on Psycholinguistics
(2), the recent text of Foss and Hakes.
Foss and Hakes observe (p. 175) that "Attempts to predict the content of
utterances have not been generally successful." That is, it's hard to know what a
person will say. This commonplace observation has an obvious parallel in the
study of dreaming, the central weakness of which is generally portrayed as the un-
predictability of dream content. The discipline of psycho linguistics has established
that difficulty in predicting what people will say does not preclude rigorous ex-
perimental and observational analysis of how they say it. By analogy, the traditional
content emphasis of empirical dream psychology seems strategically misplaced.

Sleep. Vol. 5. No.2. 1982

 COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL MODEL 171

The study of language suggests that more immediate and substantial progress lies
in process analyses of how we dream than in attempts to understand or predict
what we dream.
A further methodological similarity between the study of language production
and of dream production is that, in each case, one has to imagine that production
begins with thoughts that only later are translated into the codes in which final
outputs are apprehended. In neither case are these ideas directly observable, or

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even manipulable, except in the crudest of ways. However, psycholinguistics has
managed to circumvent this limitation by plausible strategies of indirection, some
of which will seem familiar to dream psychologists but others of which offer new
avenues of approach to the study of dream production. Based on these various
strategies, psycholinguists have reached general agreement about the existence of
several separate stages of speech generation and about their probable hierarchical
or chronological sequence. Figure 1 [after Foss and Hakes (2, p. 198) and others
(3,4)] offers, in schematic outline, a conventional psycholinguistic account of
speech production. In this account, semantic intention as to what we want to say
and the discourse modality in which we want to say it precede any specifically
verbal processing in speech generation. When such processing does occur, it is
roughly in the order: syntactic, lexical, and phonemic. Because the speech pro-
duction model seems likely to be of less general relevance to dreaming the closer it
gets to actual utterance, Fig. 1 skimps on the late steps of motor speech produc-
tion.
How is this speech-production model justified empirically? Basically, two kinds
of evidence suggest the psychological reality of the model. The first kind of evi-
dence comes from the study of the comprehension of speech, which has, com-
pared with the study of speech production, the enormous advantage that inputs
can be both observed and experimentally manipulated. One need not believe that
comprehension and production are exact process inversions of one another to
accept the idea that the characterization of a process in language comprehension
may be germane to its characterization in language production. The use of a
comprehension model to formulate a production model should occasion no sur-
prise to any reader of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (5), in which it is proposed
that dream formation can be modeled by inverting those comprehensions of
dreams that persons grapple for in free-association sessions. However, as I hope
to demonstrate shortly, looking at dream comprehension as a psycho linguist might
does offer some interesting new insights as to what may be going on during dream
formation.
The second kind of evidence on which the speech production model of Fig. 1
can be justified comes from systematic observation of that part of the speech
production process which is observable, its outputs. Two sorts of observation
have been especially important in essaying guesses about production sequences
and production units: pauses or hesitations in utterance, and errors in utterance.
As I will illustrate, these two kinds of observation have provided a relatively
strong basis from which to model what typically occurs during the production of
speech that is both fluent and correct.
My plan from this point on is as follows. First, I propose to consider how the

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172 D. FOULKES

SPEECH PRODUCTION

Production Stage "Locus"/Code Output

1 Message formulation. Access/activation of "fong-term" stores Generalized semantic-propositional in-

a) general intention regarding specific
. functional relations to be expressed
and their semantic stress.
b) processing via a discourse plan.
specifYing the kind of discourse (de-
scription, narration, etc.),
whose representational form is non-lln- tentlons regarding the form and substance
guislJC and whJch are assimilated to dis- 01 discourse.
course specific "frames," "scripts," or
schemata.

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2. Selection of skeletal syntactic frames Translation to lingUistic form: assignment Semantic-syntactic structures
and assignment of syntactic/mtona- of grammatical markers
tional stress.

3. Lexical look-up: assignment of speci- Access of lexicon, that aspect of long- Representation of specific syllabic strings.
fic lexIcal Ilems 1o skeletal semanflc- lerm storage with word-specific knowledge,
syntactic frames. thought to be organized more by phonetic,
than by semantiC, codes.

4. Storage. Phonetic code

5. Morphophonemic adiustment: late PhonetIc code Phonet!cally coded utterance plan.

appllcat!on of rules regarding affixes
and morphophonemic structure.

6. Motor contrOl system. Motor speech system. Utterance.

(AFTER: FOSS & HAKES, 1978)

FIG. 1.

study of speech comprehension and the study of speech dysfluency have

suggested the speech-production model of Fig. 1. At each step in this process, I
will want to consider how well the speech evidence and the speech model seem to
agree with what we know about the production of dreams, how the speech-
production model might have to be modified to account for peculiarities of dream
production, and what kinds of research are needed to clarify and justify these
divergent features of the dream-production model. The end product of this
analysis will be a second figure, in which the speech-production model will rema-
terialize, transformed into a model of dream production.
Evidence from the comprehension of language. The speech-production
model's characterization of long-term memory representation as abstract, rather
than verbal or visual, may seem counterintuitive. As Anderson (6) pointed out, the
evidence of ordinary introspection suggests that we have verbal memories and
visual memories. However, cognitive-psychological research suggests that this
may be merely one more instance in which introspective data are misleading
indexes of cognitive processing. Although "when we recall information from
long-term memory we tend to verbalize it or construct an image of it" (6, p. 123),
long-term memory representation itself seems to be neither specifically verbal nor
visual. For instance, studies of the comprehension of experimentally manipulated
verbal inputs suggest that verbal inputs are analyzed for the information they
contain, and that abstract propositional representations of that information, rather

Sleep, Vol. 5, No.2, 1982

 COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL MODEL 173

than literal ones of the particular verbal inputs, are ultimately used mentally by
subjects to represent their encounters with the experimental stimuli. Subjects are,
for example, more confident of having seen a sentence to which they previously
have not been exposed, but which contains the entire informational gist of a series
of sentences, than they are of having seen actual sentences from that series (7).
Such evidence provides part of the basis for the speech-production model's pro-
posal of an abstracted, semantic form of representation in long-term memory

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(Fig. 1).
Other considerations motivating this characterization are the following. (a)
Economy: it makes little sense to imagine that long-term memory is burdened with
storing literal representations of all stimuli we encounter and process. (b) Inter-
modal linkage: it seems sensible to imagine that there might be some central form
of representation which is not tied to any particular mental code or perceptual
modality, so that, for example, linguistic and nonlinguistic information can inter-
act as facilely as they do when we quickly answer a question such as "Does this
odor smell like coffee?" (2, p. 136). (c) The nature of sensory-system processing:
both neurophysiological and neuropsychological data (e.g., 8) suggest that the
perceptual systems are analyzers and that their outputs-what we have available
for long-term registration-are the results of perceptual analysis. Thus, the end
product of processing for comprehension-what we know when we know
something-is not and cannot be a replica of that object or event; rather, it is an
abstracted representation of object features or contextual relationships that con-
stitute the subjective meanings stimulated by the object or event (cf., 9). In this
sense, long-term memory is a meaning-memory.
But there may be a problem in generalizing from models of verbal comprehension
to a process such as dreaming, the outputs of which seem more perceptual. Fol-
lowing one interpretation of Penfield's research (10), one might want to assume
that there also is permanent registration of perceptual experience in, metaphori-
cally speaking, some kind of film strip or audio tape. Neisser (11) showed that to
make this extrapolation specifically from Penfield's data is unwarranted, but the
larger question of how we process nonverbal perceptual inputs remains, as does
the question of how one is to conceptualize the relationship between our knowl-
edge of what an X looks or sounds like and our other knowledge of X.
As Foss and Hakes pointed out (2, p. 137), that we store knowledge nonimagi-
nally is by no means inconsistent with the fact that we experience mental imagery.
When someone describes a situation to us that we never literally have seen, we
often can vividly picture that situation from information we extract from the
words we have heard. Indeed, in reading novels, we often seem to form definite,
but creative, depictive characterizations of both characters and settings, charac-
terizations against which we measure the reality of subsequently encountered
cinema versions of the same stories. This process illustrates the constructive-
generative nature of imaging, of which dreaming itself must be the prototypic
example. But what is the knowledge base from which this constructive imaging
proceeds?
This question currently attracts much attention in those branches of cognitive
psychology outside of psycho linguistics. Based on the considerations I mentioned

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174 D. FOULKES

earlier (nameiy economy, intermodai iinkage, and the nature of sensory-system

processing), almost no one finds it plausible to imagine that nonverbal sensory
inputs are stored untransformed, i.e., as sensory templates. But there are various
positions about how analogous the analytic products of nonverbal perceptual
processing are to its sensory inputs. Many cognitive psychologists (e.g., 6) believe
that knowledge of object appearance must be represented in a fashion similar to
knowledge of object function and significance, specifically, that both forms of

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knowledge representation are "abstract" and "propositional."
There is, in fact, experimental evidence against analogue, imaginal coding of
nonverbal inputs. In perceptual recognition tests, subjects compared test items
with interpretations of figures rather than with literal copies of them (12), and they
were more likely to recognize changes in pictures that affected meaning than those
that altered physical features but left meaning intact (13). Visual inputs seem to be
processed, much as verbal inputs are, for their informational gist. Other research
indicates that perceptual attributes are unlikely to be stored together imaginally,
since recall of one attribute of a stimulus-the case of an alphanumeric char-
acter-was not predictive of recall of another attribute of the stimulus-its
color (14).
Moreover, developmental studies (15,16), including dream-developmental evi-
dence (17), strongly imply that imaginal construction is the product of general
symbolic operations, rather than some sort of automatic retrieval to conscious-
ness of concrete visual analogues. Imaging is a process that depends upon what
Piaget (18) called "evocative" (i.e., symbolic) memory, rather than upon a more
ontogenetically and phylogenetically primitive "recognition" memory. This fact,
too, may indicate that image construction is not dependent on relatively concrete,
analogue forms of mental representation bearing the stamp of passive percep-
tion.
However, these arguments against a concrete-analogue perceptual representa-
tion in long-term memory are not necessarily arguments for an exclusively prop-
ositional form of representation in memory of appearance (or sound, etc.).
Neuropsychological data (8) suggest that there are modality-specific forms of
long-term memory that are, in an information-processing sense, prepropositional.
Part of what we know is how to analyze sensory inputs. In the adult human, the
form of this analysis is at least as much driven from the top down as from the
bottom up; that is, it is determined by what we already know and expect as much
as by current exogenous stimulation. In the left hemisphere, at least, this analysis
has been heavily influenced by language acquistion. Perceptual processing sys-
tems have become progressively better set to mesh with systems dealing specifi-
cally with speech comprehension and speech production. The rules acquired by
and exemplified in these processing systems are a kind of procedural knowledge
(2, p. 148 ff.). We learn procedures, for instance, for transforming visually per-
ceived stimuli into appropriate concepts and/or words. In the generation of mental
imagery, that is, imagery experienced in the absence of correlative retinal stimu-
lation, these procedures may be "topographically reversed" (5).
Kosslyn's recent book, Image and Mind (19), presents one of the most system-

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 COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL MODEL 175

atic empirical attacks upon the problem of image generation. Kosslyn's research
program is rooted in a rather limited imaginal domain, in which waking static or
quasistatic imaginal displays are generated, according to experimental instruc-
tions, for familiar objects. He assumes that there are, in long-term memory, both
semantic-propositional encodings and what he calls "literal" encodings. The for-
mer encode the abstract properties of objects, while the latter comprise repre-
sentations, in some sense, of the physical appearance of objects. These appear-

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ance representations are, in Kosslyn's model, highly abstract; they are in the form
of operational instructions or rules for image generation. Just as, in perceptual
recognition, a rule might be, "if it has two lines at a 45° angle and a cross-bar,
assign it the linguistic value 'capital A'" (6), so, in image generation, a rule might
be "create a pattern in which two lines intersect at a 45° angle and add a cross-
bar." Using such abstract rules, Kosslyn has performed computer simulations of
human image formation.
It must be acknowledged that some neuropsychological data seem to suggest a
more wholistic-analogue form of depiction-representation in the nondominant
hemisphere (8). However, the form of dream imagery itself, in which perceptual
features of various concepts are intermingled, argues for a priority, in REM sleep
as in wakefulness, for analytic rather than wholistic processing. Thus, henceforth
I shall assume that the sources of dream imagery lie in forms of long-term knowl-
edge representation that are abstract, and that deal either with the meanings and
functional properties of objects or events-abstract meaning memory-or with the
rules by which the physical properties of objects and events can be transformed
into meanings, and vice versa.
Which of these two kinds of memory more plausibly can be imagined to have
priority during dream generation? The substantive question, perhaps, is whether
dream imagery seems to flow along on the basis of perceptual similarity or the-
matic similarity. In general, I take the latter to be the case; that is, concepts
demand a variegated perceptual display, rather than perceptual similarity recruit-
ing unrelated concepts. Thus, I am assuming an exact topographic inversion of
waking and dreaming information processing, namely that the dream begins where
waking stimulus comprehension ends, in meaning memory. This assumption also
ties in well with the dream-ontogeny data cited earlier: fluent evocation of dream
imagery must involve a "reversibility," in Piaget's sense (18) of operations of
perceptual analysis, a reversibility not evident in dreams until it is evident in
waking thought.
I have dealt, at some length, with the representation of what Kosslyn (19) calls
"depictive" knowledge because oftwo seemingly incongruous facts: first, dreams
seem largely to be experienced imaginally rather than verbally, and second, the
dream model I am proposing here is based on the speech-production model pre-
sented earlier. Obviously, continuing justification will have to be provided for the
appropriateness of that modular choice, at least until that stage of dream produc-
tion where speech production ceases to be the basis of the dream model. My
argument to this point is that, at the level oflong-term meaning-memory organiza-
tion, which is the presumed source of both speech and dreaming, no revision of

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176 D. FOULKES

the speech model is required. I propose that both speaking and dreaming originate
with representations of knowledge that are abstracted generalizations from, and
interpretations and elaborations of, our perceptual experience.
If this proposal is correct, then one of the major possibilities in psychoneirics
for exploiting psycholinguistic data and models is that we may be able to explain
some of the peculiarities of dream experience in terms of lawful operations within
the sort of abstracted, semantic memory networks identified by psycholinguistic

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data. This possibility already has been discussed, and is being studied, by
Antrobus (20). Here, I want to make some specific proposals regarding how the
activation of a common knowledge base may differ in the production of REM
dreams and in that of waking speech, and attempt to explain, thereby, some of the
formal properties of dreams. This is where the dream model truly begins.
I want to start by considering the comprehensibility of REM dreams. The clas-
sical focus of dream psychology has been on our waking difficulties in under-
standing why we dream the things we dream. Only more recently, for example in
Rechtschaffen's paper (21), has much serious attention been given to our REM-sleep
comprehension of what we dream. It is at this latter point that psycholinguistic data
may be especially helpful. Foss and Hakes (2, pp. 100-1) make a distinction
between the literal meaning of an utterance and its intended meaning: between
what a sentence says and why it was uttered. In terms of this distinction, we may
note that our REM-sleep comprehension of the literal meaning of our dreams is
pretty good. We are relatively rarely puzzled in our dreams about what they are
saying; it is only later, when we are awake, that we are puzzled about why the
dream took the shape that it did. That our dreams generally are literally com-
prehensible cannot simply be an artifact of shoddy standards of comprehension
specific to the REM state. Even awake, we understand what was dreamed, al-
though often we remain puzzled as to why it was dreamed. It would seem that, up
through the stage of constructing a literal meaning, speech comprehension and
dream comprehension follow a parallel course. It is only at the level of recon-
structing intention that divergences appear. Why?
Here, we have two important and converging lines of evidence. First, the
dreamer, either asleep or later awake, rarely can identify a unitary intention for
the images of her or his dream, certainly not in the sense that this is possible for
most of one's waking utterances. Second, data from free-association experiments,
with dream imagery as the stimulus, suggest that (a) more output-relevant mental
contents are activated in dream production than in waking speech production; (b)
these diverse contents, considered singly, generally bear a more distant relation to
systemic output in dreaming than in speech generation; and (c) these diverse
contents, considered together, often do not, and perhaps cannot, constitute any
unitary semantic intention regarding what one wants to dream.! From these lines
of evidence, I conclude that we have no sense of intention during dreaming and we

1 Unfortunately, the data on which these suggestions are based have not as yet been systematically
organized [the fmdings are suggested both by the data of clinical dream interpretation (e.g., 5) and by
data now being collected in which a standardized protocol is being followed for collecting associations
to mentation reports]. The argument also would be stronger if it rested on a systematic comparison of
associations to nocturnal mentation reports and to typical waking utterances.

Sleep, Vol. 5, No.2, 1982

 COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL MODEL 177

are unable, asleep or awake, to reconstruct plausibly why we dreamed a particular

dream because there was no intention in the formation of any particular dream
image. By intention, I mean a recoverable unitary plan for conveying some partic-
ular message. This is the sense in which, in the speech case, we ordinarily con-
ceptualize intention, in terms of specific semantic planning. As will be seen
momentarily, I do not, and of course cannot, believe that dreams are wholly
unplanned. But, at the level of semantic intention, that may well be the case. This

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interpretation is the most parsimonious reading of the evidence just discussed.
Specifically, I imagine the situation in long-term memory-the same system iden-
tified by psycholinguistic research-to be like this during REM sleep: there is the
simultaneous activation or disinhibition of multiple, and often semantically dis-
tant, representational units or organizations. Some ofthese elements or organiza-
tions, perhaps including those that are, in a relative sense, regnant ones, will be
those in episodic or autobiographical memory (22). This, at least, is what most
dream theory tells us, but before that hypothesis is elevated to modular status, we
need a careful tabulation of the results of standardized dream-association experi-
ments.
This "spreading activation" (23) or disinhibition should, however, not be ran-
dom. Specifically, it should conform to principles of organization postulated by
psycholinguistically derived models of the waking organization of long-term stor-
age. What are these principles? First, specifically lexical verbal knowledge is
represented separately from knowledge of the concepts denoted by words. No
identity is assumed between words and thoughts; rather, words are mapped into
thought-representations in long-term memory during speech comprehension, and,
with greater or lesser success, thought-representations find specifically verbal
form during speech production. Thus, lexical knowledge is knowing how to map
articulemes and graphemes into concepts, and vice versa. Although it is conven-
tional for psycholinguists to reify this knowledge and speak of a lexicon, I prefer
to view lexical knowledge as another form of procedural knowledge, with parallel
status to imaginal knowledge. Word-search experiments (e.g., 24) suggest that
lexical processing is organized largely on the basis of phonetic similarity.
As for the organization of our more abstractly represented ideational knowledge
itself, cognitive psychologists generally think that their data suggest an organiza-
tion in which concepts are analyzed into various features (including, for concrete
concepts, appearance features, abstractly characterized) and in which concepts
are interrelated in a network-like fashion on the basis of their semantic similarity.
Experimental procedures exist for scaling the relative distance at which concepts
are presumed to be interrelated, and for establishing the pattern of their semantic
interrelationship in long-term storage. Less is known at present about inter-
relationships that are sustained by specifically autobiographical knowledge
(episodic memory) than about those that are sustained more by featural similarity
(semantic memory; 22). One needed and salutary effect of the construal of
dreaming as a fit topic for cognitive psychology may well be an impetus to more
serious examination of the structure of autopiographical knowledge.
But, even on the basis of what is now suspected abolH the organization of
semantic memory, some suggestions can be made, about how spreading

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178 D. FOULKES

activatiorJdisinhibition in this system contributes, in a lawful manner, to the ap-

pearance of certain formal characteristics in dreams. Dream psychologists know
that dream imagery often blends features of different concepts. In Freud's "Irma"
dream, for instance, there is a composite image in which Dr. Breuer has the limp
and clean-shavenness of Emanuel Freud (5, p. 112). It should be possible to
predict, from independent waking study of how concepts and their features are
organized in long-term memory, likely and unlikely forms of such imaginal fusion

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in dream imagery. If dreaming is conceptually based, then composite dream imag-
ery should build on conceptual feature analysis, and certain kinds of
composites-such as blending the right side of Breuer's face with the left side of
Emanuel Freud's-should never occur, because that does not reflect how we
conceptually organize our knowledge of persons and their appearances.
Anecdotal data suggest that the conceptual organization model is correct, and that
imaginal blends in dream imagery generally do conform to featural analysis, but
more systematic data need to be collected on the boundary conditions of compos-
ite image formation during REM sleep.
The peculiarities of dream composition include not only the blending of con-
cepts, but also some dissociative phenomena. Some cognitive psychologists be-
lieve that we file, along with propositions, representations of the permissible
inferences entailed by these propositions. In dreaming, there seems often to be a
dissociation of inference markers from the propositions to which they are at-
tached. That is, there is an illogic in the conclusions the dreamer draws from
phenomenal facts. Another form of dissociation in dreaming involves the omission
of features in the portrayal of otherwise identifiable images. Both these forms of
dissociation, too, should be demonstrable as lawful kinds of degradation in the
mnemonic organization suggested by waking psycholinguistic research. That is,
. for a given dreamer, the strength with which an inference follows from a proposi-
tion, and the centrality of an object feature to object classification, might be
inversely related to the likelihood that the inference or feature will become de-
tached from the proposition or object in a dream.
Another seeming peculiarity of dream experience is the way in which dream
imagery seems to portray reversals of what we take to be our standard waking
conceptions. The traditional interpretation of such reversals is that they are moti-
vated, but there may be a less complex and more empirically justifiable explana-
tion. Semantic memory research suggests that, in the featural and semantic
analysis of certain concepts, we may code direcily what a concept's opposite is or
what a concept specifically is not. Thus, the time a human subject takes to verify,
in a reaction-time experiment, a proposition such as "a whale is not a fish" may
be less than the verification time for" a whale is not a bird," precisely because one
relationship has been taught, and encoded, directly, while the other has been left
to inference (25). A specific prediction from semantic memory theory might be
that dream reversals should involve directly coded reversals or negations more
often than inferentially-established ones. Once again, the degradation of waking
memory organization would be lawful, in that independently established semantic
distance would be inversely related to the likelihood that concepts and their oppo-
sites or negatives would be confused in dream construction.

Sleep, Vol. 5, No.2. 1982

 COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL MODEL 179

A reasonable goal of the several kinds of studies I have proposed would be to do

for dreaming what psycholinguists already have done successfully for slips of
speech (2, pp. 189-197), namely to show that puzzling features of a symbolic
process can be readily explained as atypical but nonetheless lawful operations in a
cognitive processing system, and that, in these explanations, no recourse need be
made to motivational constructs of a Freudian sort.
Before moving on to a consideration of the production systems which operate

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on long-term memorial contents activated during REM sleep, two interrelated
questions need to be broached. What is the sequential nature oflong-term memory
activation during an REM period? In what sort of discourse frame are the memo-
rial contents activated during REM sleep processed? The questions are interre-
lated because they both are germane to the question of how the apprehended
dream gains sequential coherence in the face of the mUltiple and often inconsistent
memorial elements that seem to be activated during REM sleep. There are at least
two possibilities, which are not mutually exclusive. First, there may be, across the
sequential moments of REM sleep, substantial continuity in the nature of the
autobiographical memories that are activated; because these memories may act
as organizing foci for inputs to the dream production system, there may be ensuing
dream continuity as well. Second, there may be, once certain memories have
gained access to the productional system early in the REM period, a kind of
syntactic constraint on the memories or knowledge that will be accepted for
further processing. There may be rules, for example, that, once the dream has
gained minimal momentum, propositional knowledge is accepted for further
dream processing only to the extent (a) that its product promises to be imagery
that will, in isolation, be coherent and propositionally well-formed and (b) that this
imagery also will be thematically coherent with the dream as it already has been
dreamed and is currently being dreamed. These mechanisms would be syntactic in
the sense that they would be requirements for well-formed imagery and for well-
formed sequences of dream imagery. Both mechanisms presuppose a feedback
monitoring of dream outputs at the level of their literal comprehensibility.
There is reason to believe that the thematic continuity of dream experience
depends, at least in part, on continuity across the REM period in the kinds of
memories and knowledge active in long-term memory. Furthermore, there is a
novel use of free-association data that can be employed to estimate the extent and
nature of this thematic coherence in long-term memory during an REM period.
When a dream report is organized in the dream's sequence of occurrence, the
associations to successive moments of the dream can be analyzed for their the-
matic coherence; that is, one can chart the presumed flow of long-term memory
activation during the REM period by asking how associations to successive dream
imagery cohere with one another. In addition to using associations to tell us about
the dream, we also can use the dream-as stimulus-to provoke data on nocturnal
associative organization. To do this, of course, one will need a sophisticated
means of coding and interrelating the verbal data of association sessions (e.g., 1).
There is also reason to believe, from the degree of semantic continuity in long-
term memory during REM sleep suggested now by impressionistic readings of
associative data, that semantic continuity will not provide a sufficient explanation

Sleep, Vol. 5, No.2, 1982

180 D. FOULKES

of the coherence of manifest dream experie.nce. That is, we also will have to
imagine the operation of syntactic constraints of the sort I have suggested to
explain the general well-formedness of individual dream images and of the se-
quential unfolding of dream experience. These constraints imply a kind of
asemantic intention in dreaming. That is, they imply that dream production is
guided by the intention to create imagery that matches the momentary coherence
of our waking perceptual experience (for example, imagery which is neither over-

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loaded nor underloaded with propositional meaning) and by the intention to or-
ganize this imagery temporally in accordance with a temporal sequencing that also
approximates that of our waking perceptual experience. I believe that these syn-
tactic intentions must exist during REM dreaming, because if they did not, from
what we can observe oflong-term memory organization by way of free-associative
data, there would be much more jumbled imagery and much more thematic in-
coherence in REM dreams than there is. One interesting bit of phenomenological
evidence in favor of syntactic thematic planning is that, on awakening midway
during REM periods, laboratory subjects often say things like "It wasn't finished
yet" about the dream they have reported, even though they profess not to know
the specific semantic intentions underlying what they have dreamed already, or
that would have guided the dream to its completion.
In following these rules, the dream-production system must, in some sense, be
perceived as proceeding grammatically, but the grammars in question are neither
specifically linguistic nor, fortunately, specific to REM sleep. Because image-
formation and narrative construction can be studied, and have been studied (e.g.,
19,26) in other contexts, these parts ofthe modeling of dream formation need not
and should not rely exclusively on dream data. Here is a point at which
psychoneirics can profit handsomely from the evidence of other cognitive-
psychological disciplines.
But first, perhaps, we need to study a little more closely exactly what kind of
temporal coherence the manifest REM dream actually does have. Just as we need
careful studies of how activated long-term memories seem to cohere across the
REM period, so, too, do we need reliable observations of the temporal coherence
possessed by their ultimate product-the REM dream. We need "story gram-
mars" of the REM dream (27). To what sort of schema does the sequencing of
events in an ordinary dream best conform? Is the dream structured like a story?
Does the sequential order of the dream covary culturally with different modal
cultural forms for story discourse, or does it seem to be more universal than that?
Or may, in fact, the dream be structured less like a stylized story, and more like
life, in which there can be both more unpredictability and more boring sequences
than in a well-crafted story, but to the understanding of which we bring cognitive
schemata that make it appear generally to be sequentially coherent? These are, in
principle, answerable questions, and questions well worth asking.
One feature of the first stage of my psychoneiric model of dream production that
parallels the first stage of the speech production model is the assignment of
semantic stress to conceptual units. This stress information is presumably an input
to the assignment of intonational stress in the next stage of the dream model,
which information (ultimately) may activate an affect generator responsible for

Sleep, Vo!' 5, No.2, 1982

 · ".rr
COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL MODEL 181

whatever affect appears in the manifest dream. Ontogenetic dream data (17) make
it unlikely that affect plays any general organizational or high-priority role in
dream generation, but dream affect obviously is something that cannot be ignored
in any dream-production model. In my model, its appearance in the manifest
dream experience would be subject to the same syntactic constraints as any other
dream feature, which agrees with my observation that dream affect almost invari-
ably is, Freud (5) to the contrary notwithstanding, appropriate both to its imagined

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momentary dream correlates and to its larger narrative context.
As Freud recognized, an important cognitive question regarding dreaming is
why dreams are so easily forgotten. As Freud also realized, a satisfactory answer
to this question may provide important clues as to what is going on in dream
formation. How, in terms of the model presented thus far, can one think of this
wide gap between the momentary impressiveness of dream experience and its
subsequent evanescence? Cognitive psychology conceives of attention as a lim-
ited resource, and of any process that cannot deal with all of its potential inputs as
an attention-demanding process (28). As I have described dream production, it
will be seen that the construction of semantic-syntactic structures for the diverse
meaning representations active during REM sleep must be a highly attention-
demanding process. This state of overload under which I am proposing that a
syntactic processor must operate during REM sleep might well reduce the atten-
tional allocation to processes that might otherwise be expected to accompany
REM dreaming.
A conspicuous case in point may be the relative absence, during REM dream-
ing, of constructive processing in encoding the dream itself for memory. Con-
structive processing means an attempt, at encoding, to elaborate a current content
by interpreting it in the context of the larger body of one's knowledge. Such
elaboration generally is lacking during dreaming, and that absence would lead,
predictably, to generally poor recall. More broadly, the REM dream illustrates
nicely the principle that what is recalled of a stimulus is more a function of the
depth at which one processes it than of its momentary vividness. A related phe-
nomenon, perhaps, with respect to both cause and effect, is the observation some
subjects have made to me in sessions in which I have sampled their mental activity
in relaxed wakefulness (e.g., 29). They have said, in effect, "Gee, I didn't know I
could dream like that when I was awake, but it must be going on a lot of the time
and I never even noticed it before." Thus, an explanation of amnesia for REM
dreams might better focus on cognitive peculiarities of dream generation than on
any processes, physiological or psychological, imagined to be specific to the REM
state.
Evidence from speech dysfluency. Much of what psycholinguists know of
speech production processing past the level of message formulation (i.e., mid-
range processing) comes from systematic observation of speech dysfluencies.
From pauses, which suggest that what we say is not entirely planned in advance,
one can get some indication of the size of planning units in speech production. One
can use speech errors to the same end, as well as to suggest the nature of the units
themselves and their hierarchical organization. For instance, Foss and Hakes (2,
p. 191) mention the speaker who said "pig and vat" for "big and fat." The voicing

Sleep, Vol, 5, No.2, 1982

182 D. FOULKES

feature of the b first was omitted, resulting in the voiceless p of "pig and then
7"

transposed to the first sound of "fat," resulting in the production of a voiced v

instead of a voiceless f. The example suggests both that "big and fat" was
phonetically planned within a single unit and that the voicing feature of conso-
nants is a natural unit of phonemic production. Its transposition in this case was a
lawful process, as are errors of speech more generally. Specifically, the result was
a phonetically possible combination in the English language (including, in this

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case, real English words), it involved a reversal of sound features in the same
structural position in the two words in question, the words themselves were stress
words (in contrast to the intact "and"), and the sound-feature change was within
the same noun phrase (whereas word changes are generally observed across noun
phrases, suggesting a higher order unit for lexical than for phonetic planning). In
the same fashion, the fact that sentence stress is unchanged with lexical errors, as
in "Stop beating your brick against a head wall," suggests that an assignment of
syntactic structure precedes lexical selection, and the fact that indefinite articles
generally agree with the words one actually utters, as in "a kice ream cone"
instead of "an kice ream cone," suggests that morphophonemic adjustments are
made subsequent to lexical selection (2, p. 193). These are some of the kinds
of data, then, on which midrange processing stages have been chronologically
ordered in the speech-production model of Fig. 1.
In this context, I now want to address two issues. First, are there, or could there
be, dysfluency data in dream production that might provide a basis for ordering
midrange stages of dream production and for determining the nature of various
planning units in dream production? Second, how far along the midrange speech-
production system can we travel before we have to make substantial modifications
of that model to accommodate the fact that dreaming is not speaking, but imagin-
ing and imaging? As will be seen, my answer to the second question is that speech
planning (inner speech) must playa pervasive role in dream formation. But first,
let us consider the question of dream pauses and dream errors.
Our first impression of our REM dreams is most likely that they are pauseless.
But that would have to mean either that dreaming is better planned than
speech-which seems doubtful--or that, at the other extreme, dreaming proceeds
effortlessly because it is not constrained by any planning considerations at all-
which, on the face of it, seems highly improbable. There must be breaks or pauses
in dream experience, and it might prove instructive to try to increase research
subjects' awareness of them. Suppose, for example, one used microscopic report
methods-the subject describing first what was happening just before awakening,
and only then describing other, earlier, remembered dream contents-and investi-
gated the relationship of reports of an apparent absence of dream experie'nce just
before the awakening not to concomitant REM physiology but to prior dream
sequencing. More generally, we stand in great need of more data on the temporal
phenomenology of dream experiencing, a topic which, since some early studies by
Dement (30,31), has attracted little attention. How many propositional units of
REM dream content can be experienced in a given unit of real time? Is the
seeming pauselessness of REM dreaming related to a measure able holding pro-
cess, in which an experiential unit is reiterated or extended until the next unit has

Sleep, Vol, 5, No, 2, 1982

 COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL MODEL 183

been planned? With ingenuity, sophisticated and articulate subjects, and appro-
priate waking pretraining at estimating temporal intervals and describing the
course of waking mentation, these may be questions thit can be addressed with
relevant empirical data.
Are there errors in dreaming? If an error is defined as a mismatch between
intention and execution, and if dreaming is constrained by the syntactic intentions
of creating literally comprehensible images and of binding them together to con-

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form to narrative or other schemata of coherency, then, yes, occasionally there
are errors in dream formation. In REM sleep, at least (sleep onset is probably a dif-
ferent case; see 32), these errors seem more often to consist of sequential disjointed-
ness than of poorly formed imagery at any given moment. Sometimes, one seems
even to observe the attempted reparation of a dream error of this sort, when a dream
element is transformed with the effect of greater narrative consistency. Examina-
tion of dream errors in relation to a shift in the activation of memories in long-term
storage, as indicated by conjoint free-associative data, may identify the occasions
for such errors, while the errors themselves may be, as in psycholinguistics, clues
as to planning units and sequences in constructional processing. One cannot help
but be greatly impressed at the large uses to which psycholinguists have put such
seemingly inconsequential phenomena as production errors, and cannot help but
feel that the examination of errors in dreaming may turn out to be equally pro-
ductive.
Where, in a dream-production model, should one begin to focus on image gen-
eration, particularly on the generation of visual images? In my reading of the
evidence at hand, the verbal system must be operative in dream formation at least
through the point of lexical look-up in speech production. Verbal involvement is
suggested by the following observations. (a) We are highly verbal creatures, and
verbal thinkers, and although there may be relative changes in left versus right
hemisphere activation during REM sleep as compared with wakefulness, these
are, at best, relative changes rather than signs of verbal disengagement. (b) We
have speech in our REM dreams, speech which often is linguistically quite com-
plex (33)-indeed, conversation is a practically universal content in them (34)-
and we do speak, occasionally, during our REM dreams, generally in a way that
is keyed to the rest of the dream (35). (c) Congenitally totally blind persons
experience dreams without visual imaginal realizations, often in the form of
speech or a "just knowing" (36) that must be like verbally mediated waking
knowledge; the content of their dreams is otherwise so much like that of
sighted persons that the speech, sounds, movements, feelings, and thoughts that
sighted persons experience in their dreams cannot be simply responses to dream
visualization. Rather, they must be independent yet correlated outputs of a larger
experience-simulation system that is not specifically tied to a visual-imaginal base
(37). (d) Some sighted persons also apparently experience dreams without specific
visual-imaginal realizations, and the evidence here is clear that dreaming is not
sustained by compensatory activation of nonvisual imagery production (38). (e)
Visual dream imagery clearly is influenced by the phonetic value of words; that is,
the basis of image formation can be alliterative. For instance, Freud (5) cites
images reported by Maury that dealt successively with "pelerinage," "Pelletier,"

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184 D. FOULKES

and ~ ~pene. ~, (f) Aphasics who lose inner speech-presumably the ability to for-
mulate their thoughts in syntactic frames with some lexical content-may not
dream at all (1). (g) As mentioned earlier, ontogenetic data suggest that the earliest
appearance of the kind of imaging that characterizes our dreams is dependent on
symbolic operations that are not figurative in nature. (h) The narrative continuity
of dreaming suggests the engagement of planning and self-regulatory systems that,
according to some neuropsychological data (8), may, because of their sequential-

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organization properties, be verbally mediated.
From this evidence, I want to make the admittedly controversial suggestion
not only that lexical processing is a dominant factor in midrange stages of dream
construction but also that imaginal processing may not even enter the process of
dream construction until after the point of lexical look-up. Because dreaming
consists of organized sequences of visual-spatial imagery, a sequential plan must
take precedence over the selection of the particular imaginal components that
implement the plan. I propose that this plan is the output of a verbal processing
system, and that it accounts for the thematic coherence of dreaming. The concept
of a limited-capacity verbal processing system, with both syntactic and lexical
components, explains the orderliness of REM dream experience, despite the dif-
fuse and sometimes inconsistent nature of the contents activated in long-term
memory during REM sleep. At the syntactic level, in particular, the dream gains
the structure of literally comprehensible experience and, guided by the feedback
of the literal comprehension of what already has been dreamed, gains the aspect of
sequentially comprehensible experience.
There is not space here to consider later stages of dream production, in which
imaginal production systems are recruited in the service of the evolving dream
plan. Indeed, not much as yet is known about them. Presumably, the selection of
lexical items activates processes of appearance generation, sound generation, and
affect generation. As Freud (5) observed, imaginal generation would be more
successful for certain lexical items-concrete ones, for instance-than for
others-abstract ones. But, by virtue of the prior selection of a narrative or
perception-simulating discourse plan, most of the lexical input to the image
generator already would be suitably concrete for visual depiction. Errors at this
point-slips of the mental eye-presumably would involve the confusion of de-
pictively similar concepts, whereas earlier-introduced errors might involve the
confusion of phonetically similar concepts. A specific, testable prediction of my
hypothesis of the priority of verbal processing in dream formation would be that
phonetically based image linkages-such as Maury's perseverations-should be
observed across larger dream units than should depictiveiy based image linkages.
Another prediction of my hypothesis, the testing of which probably will prove
more tricky, is that aphasics temporarily lacking inner speech (an admittedly
slippery concept, but defined somewhat along the lines I have suggested above)
will experience either no dream imagery at all, or sporadic and disorganized dream
Imagery.
Presumably, for most persons the visual-imaginal system becomes increasingly
salient in late stages of dream production. But specifically verbal contents-
thoughts and speech-often do appear in our dreams, and for some persons,

Sleep. Vol. 5. No.2. 1982

 COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL MODEL 185

DREAM PRODUCTION

Production Stage "Locus"/Code Output

1 Input to syntactic processor
a) Multiple conceptual/propositional
activation, with disinhibition 01 ordinary
(waking) barriers to the intermixing ot
concepts, features, propositions and
their entailments.
b) Actl'va1ion 01 schemata in a particu-
Long-term stores are coded non-verbally.
in abstract semantic representations. which.
when activated with a particular degree of
strength over time, are assimdated to
organizing schemata
Multiple. partly schematized, conceptual
outputs, with some temporal consistency,
owing to temporal consistency In salient
memories activated in long-term storage
during the REM period.

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lar discourse modality (narratIon and!
or life simulation).
c) Assimilat"lon 01 some salient but not
totally consistent collectivity of these
contents (possibly generally includtng
autobiographical representat"lons) to
discourse-specific schemata, and to
assignment of semantic stress.
2. Selection of skeletal syntactic frames Translation to lingUistic form, assignment Semantic-syntactic structures.
and assignment of syntaclic/intonallon- of grammatical markers
al stress to propositional inputs on a
limited capacity basis,
Inputs selected on basis of proPOSI-
tional well-formedness and thematic
consistency (based on feedback~monl~
toring of prior dream production).
3. LeXical look-up: aSSignment of speci- Access to lexicon~ largely phonetic coding. Representation of specific syllabic strings.
fic lexical items to skeletal semantic
syntactic frames.
4. Storage. PhonetiC code.
5. Input to modality-specific representa- Phonetic code. Phonetically coded plan for experience
tion systems(morphophonemlc, image simulation.
generator, aftect generator, etc.).

FIG. 2.

verbal processes must, perforce, playa major role in manifest dream formation.
These facts argue that there is nothing inevitable or essential in this late bending of
verbally formulated thoughts to operations that are pictorial in their focus of
application. Perhaps our best hopes for modeling these late nonverbal aspects of
the dream production process lie in dream studies that give careful attention to
dream imagery qua imagery and in waking studies, like Kosslyn's (19), in which
"instructions" to imaging systems can be experimentally manipulated.
Summary. I have attempted to describe a dream-production system that both is
consistent in its major outlines with evidence from the study of speech production
and is faithful to what facts we now have relevant to the dream case. The result, in
Fig. 2, is a modification of the speech-production model presented earlier. The
modification specifies early and midrange stages of dream production. One major
difference between the two figures is that, in dream production, message formula-
tion in the linguistic sense is largely absent. If this feature of the model is correct,
it has obvious implications for the uninterpreted-dream-as-an-unopened-Ietter
school of dream interpretation (39). The other major difference, of course, lies at
the bottom of the figures; in dreaming, the output is neither speech nor thought
that consistently is verbally formulated. Rather, it is a multimodal perceptual
simulation. But, in between, all the way through the stage of lexical look-up, the
model imagines that there is not all that much difference between the production
processes of speaking and of dreaming. The model proposes that, in the absence

Sleep, Vol. 5, No.2, 1982

186 D. FOULKES

of specific semantic intentions to I.:onvey unitary messages, the momentary or-

ganization and sequential coherence of the dream are attributable largely to mech-
anisms that are syntactic in character; that is, mechanisms whose investment is
not so much in saying any particular thing as in insuring that whatever is said is
literally and thematically comprehensible. If the model is correct in its assumption
that it is a verbal syntactic-lexical-phonetic process that supplies inputs to image
generation, then we need not worry as much as we sometimes do about dealing

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with verbal reports of visual imagery in dream analysis, and linguistic analytic
schemes are applied appropriately to such reports in the attempt to recover the
essence of the dream (1).
I want, in conclusion, to emphasize the major aims of this exercise: to illustrate
how one can approach dreaming from a process rather than a content perspective,
and to suggest some ofthe possibilities of such an approach, which I have called a
psychoneiric one, by analogy to the way psycholinguists study language. One
cannot help but be greatly impressed by how much has been learned by psycholin-
guists about how we comprehend, produce, and acquire language. Current under-
standings of the human use of language stand in sharp contrast to the undeveloped
and ill-coordinated state of the psychology of language several decades ago.
Psycholinguistics may constitute not only an essential supporting discipline for the
psychology of dreaming, but also a strategic model that we in dream psychology
might well consider emulating.
The conjectural nature ofthe present model is acknowledged. At present, there
is not enough evidence in psychoneirics to sustain much weight from any theoreti-
cal superstructure. But my point is not that the present model is truth, but that it,
or something like it, may be a heuristic instrument that can guide us not only to a
more adequate data base for future modeling but also to more effective collabora-
tion with those other scientific disciplines from which we stand to learn the most.

Acknowledgments: Preparation of this paper was supported by NIMH Grant 32063. The
paper was initiated during a seminar in the Department of Psychology at Emory Univer-
sity, winter term 1981. I thank the seminar participants for their contributions, and Nancy
H. Kerr for her careful readings of earlier versions of the current manuscript, which was
presented to the Association for the Psychophysiological Study of Sleep, Hyannis, Mas-
sachusetts, June 1981.

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