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.