Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A new explanation is offered for the phenomenon of dreaming, based on the findings about brain activits during sleep reported in McClelland. McNaughton, and O'Reilly (1995). Many of the phenomena that make dreams seem so strange to us are explained as a byproduct of the process of storing temporary memones into permanent memory during sleep, as it occurs in the connectionist networks of the brain. This explanation provides physiological support for for Malcolm's (1962) criticism of Dement and KIcitman's (1957) interpretations of their findings about the correlation between REM sleep and dreaming, suggesting that the sense of having had a dream is an artifact of being awakened during the process of memory storage.