A hypothesis about parallelism vs. seriality in dreams

Abstract

The current article discusses the hypothesis about parallelism vs. Seriality in dreams. The process of dream building implies the construction of a complex network of closely interrelated sources. On the other hand, the dream experience develops as a succession of events. In this paper a hypothesis is advanced about how the psychophysiological system of dream building, which is distributed, acts to provide a serial output. This hypothesis is basically connected with the property, enjoyed by the dream experience, of simultaneously representing a plurality of meanings. Our point is that the serial output is created by the system in a conceptually simple way, i.e., by providing a dream plot able to simultaneously represent the overcoming of the present concerns, which are more than one because of the shift of the present concern. This property appears as a typical feature of the dreaming experience.