Psychological Review Copyright 1991 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.

l991,Vol-98, No. 1.96-121 0033-295X/9I/S3.00

Dreaming: Cognitive Processes During Cortical Activation

and High Afferent Thresholds

John Antrobus
City College, City University of New York

The concepts of nonlocal, or distributed, cortical and cognitive activation are examined for their
usefulness in describing the relations between sleep and waking neurocognitive processes. Changes
in the pattern of distributed activation and inhibition of selected portions of sensory, cognitive, and
motor decision modules account for the differences in imagery and thought across sleep and
waking states in comparable environments. The massive inhibition of sensory and proprioceptive
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input to perceptual modules in Stage I REM sleep leaves the perceptual and cognitive modules, by
default, with theirown output as their sole input. Given this constraint, the activation of portions of
the cortical structures that execute waking perceptual, cognitive, and motor responses is necessary
and sufficient to produce the imagery and thought of dreaming sleep. Connectionist models are
introduced so that neurophysiological and cognitive concepts of distributed and local activation
and inhibition can be translated into a common language, and in so doing, are used to simulate
several processes fundamental to the production of imaginal thought and dreaming.

This article is predicated on the assumption that the neuro-
cognitive processes of dreaming sleep can be best understood
in the contexts of contemporary cognitive psychology and neu-
rophysiology, and it expresses the hope that a better compre-
hension of this puzzling, perceptionlike, but nonsensory cogni-
tive process may, in turn, contribute to the theoretical advance-
ment of these parent disciplines.
The impetus for this research effort comes from the finding
of Aserinsky and Kleitman (1953) that people are much more
likely to report dreamlike mentation when awakened from elec-
troencephalogram (EEG)-defined Sleep Stage 1 REM (rapid
eye movement) than when awakened from Sleep Stage 2 (often
referred to as REM and non-REM [NREM] sleep, respec-
tively). Indeed, 93.5% of REM-NREM report pairs can be
correctly matched with their sleep states simply by judging
which member is more dreamlike (Antrobus, 1983). The re-
markable strength of this association suggests that it might be
comparatively easy to identify the precise neurophysiological
configuration that is responsible for the dreamlike qualities of
sleep mentation. Published in the Journal of Experimental Psy-
chology by two physiologists at a time when behaviorist canons
prohibited experimental psychologists from making inferences
about private experience, this neurocognitive claim promised a
new era in which higher cognitive processes could be translated
into neurological terms. But the promise has gone largely unre-
alized in the subsequent 38 years. Dreaming, the production of
visual and often bizarre, storylike, hallucinatory sequences of
thought and imagery, was regarded as a unique experiential
phenomenon, the characteristics of which must be the responsi-
bility of a similarly singular neurophysiological process. The
early models of cognitive psychology were not particularly help-
ful for representing the process of generating dream imagery
and thought, nor did they suggest a satisfactory way to span the
formidable neuro-cognitive gap.
The theoretical approach taken here assumes that imaginal
and thought processes of dreaming sleep are modified forms of
waking perceptual and cognitive processes. It rests on the as-
sumption that the characteristics that dreaming and perception
have in common must be produced by the activation of the
same processing modules.
The usefulness of the neurocognitive term activation depends
on the extent to which the concepts of neural and cognitive
activation are, at the molar level, loosely equivalent. At the mo-
lar level, neural activation is, in fact, denned by active percep-
tual and cognitive processing, but at the levels of modular and
micro processes, the terms neural and cognitive activation are
equivalent only as working hypotheses. The assumption of
equivalence becomes more shaky as the state of the neurocog-
nitive system shifts from waking to sleep. The organization of
neural processes also shifts dramatically in different sleep
states, so that it is increasingly risky to identify the altered
neural activity in a particular structure with the same percep-
tual or cognitive process carried out by that structure in the
waking state.
In light of these difficulties, this article reviews the current
theories and recent research on distributed activation in sleep
before going on to present a neurocognitive theory of sleep
mentation that is based on distributed activation. Several of the
neural and cognitive relationships described by the theory are
then mapped onto each other by translating them into connec-
tionist models. This article concludes with several simulations
of the models.

The Concept of Activation Within Sleep

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to John
Antrobus, Department of Psychology, City College, City University of Aserinsky and Kleitman (1953) located the subjectively ac-
New York, New York, New York 10031. tive experience of dreaming in a state where physical immobil-

96
 DREAMING: COGNITIVE AND CORTICAL PROCESSES
ity and high sensory thresholds were paradoxically coupled
with a cortical EEC and EM pattern that was remarkably simi-
lar to that of waking. With this discovery they inadvertently
challenged the widely held assumption that the joint occur-
rence of low sensory thresholds, high motor activity, and de-
synchronized EEG necessarily defines a state of cortical activa-
tion.
Zimmerman (1967,1970) skirted the challenge when he ex-
amined the effect of cerebral "arousal" on dreaming. Activated
sleep, or what he called "light" sleep, was denned by the individ-
ual-difference variable, the auditory awakening threshold,
which Zimmerman also found to be associated with elevated
heart and respiration rates, the core body temperature, and
spontaneous body movements and awakenings. Mentation re-
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ports were solicited from intervals of undisturbed REM and
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NREM sleep. Highly activated ("low threshold") subjects re-
ported more dreaming in Stage 2 NREM than did low activated
subjects, but the relation was not seen within REM sleep, ar-
gued Zimmerman, because of a ceiling in REM sleep activa-
tion. He concluded that "dreaming is a function of cerebral
arousal [read high activation] in the absence of reality contact"
(Zimmerman, 1970, p. 547). The potential contradiction here is
that low "reality contact" implies high sensory thresholds,
which in turn define for Zimmerman low cerebral arousal.
The dilemma was solved when Morrison and Pompeiano
(1965) and Pompeiano (1970) showed that within REM sleep,
sensory thresholds and motor activity were controlled indepen-
dently of cortical activation. They identified subcortical nuclei
that inhibited motoneurons and afferent input differently
within each sensory modality. This implied that Zimmerman's
use of auditory arousal threshold as an index of cortical activa-
tion during sleep, particularly within REM sleep, was not
warranted.
The assumption that cortical activation translates into cogni-
tive activation next appeared in hemisphere asymmetry the-
ories of dreaming. Ornstein (1972), van Valen (1973), Galin
(1974), Broughton (1975), and Bakan (1976) proposed that the
right cortical hemisphere is more active than the left during
REM sleep and that it is the primary origin of dream imagery.
The empirical support for this notion, recently reviewed by
Antrobus (1987), is weak. Indeed, the hemisphere that is essen-
tial for the experience of dreaming is the left.
In 1977, Hobson and McCarley (1977; Hobson, 1988) pre-
sented the activation-synthesis theory of dreaming that de-
scribed an activated cerebral cortex and the inhibition of affer-
ent input as requisite for dreaming. Those two assumptions are
central to the theory described in this article. A major emphasis
of their theory, however, was that the input to the activated
cortex is eye movement (EM) information which originates in
the pontine brain stem and reaches the cortex in the form of
pontine-lateral geniculate-occipital cortex (PGO) spike bursts.
Note that EMs occur only intermittently within an REM period
and predominate in the early portion of the period. A critical
corollary to their assumption is that PGO bursts provide input
to the cortex but are not initiated by the cortical processes and
therefore cannot be influenced by cognitive processes. Hobson
and McCarley (1977) attributed the bizarreness of dreams to
the difficulties encountered by the cortex in "synthesizing" this
EM information within the context of prior cognitive processes
97
produced in the cortex. Although the activation-synthesis
model articulated well the neurophysiological processes that
distinguish waking, REM, and NREM sleep, its account of
cognitive processing was confined to the metaphor, that is, syn-
thesis.
Mamelak and Hobson (1989) recently proposed that dream
bizarreness might also be the consequence of an increment in
errors in the output of forebrain neural networks during REM
sleep caused by the "withdrawal of the modulatory influences
of norepinephrine and serotonin" (p. 201).
Central to all of these theories is the assumption that the
remarkable similarity of the asynchronous, waking EEG to the
REM sleep EEG constitutes neurophysiological evidence that
the cortical and cognitive processes of REM sleep are more
"active" than those of NREM sleep, where the EEG is decidedly
synchronous. Yet there is good reason not to accept this as-
sumption uncritically. The functional relation between cortical
EEG asynchrony and cognitive activation ultimately rests on
the empirical association of asynchrony with information pro-
cessing in the waking state. Unfortunately this association is not
readily demonstrable in sleep. Johnson and Lubin (1966)
showed that the index of activity of some psychophysiological
processes is sometimes inverted in waking and sleep. Electro-
dermal activity, a measure of emotional responsivity in waking,
is most active during Stage 4, the least active stage of sleep. The
traditional behavioral indices of rate of information processing
are not available in sleep to solve the dilemma because the
thresholds for various sensory and motor response systems are
not only high and erratic but exhibit considerable indepen-
dence of each other (Pompeiano, 1970; Wills & Trinder, 1978).
The problem becomes even more complicated because the
term activation, which is central for information processing and
is a critical concept in this article, has many different referents
in neurophysiological and cognitive models. Consider the di-
versity of its referents in models of single neurons, neural net-
works, neural pathways, and subcortical and cortical subpopu-
lations of neurons (see Hobson & Steriade, 1986), in cognitive
models of response latency (Anderson, 1983), and in parallel
distributed processes (Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986). To fur-
ther complicate matters, the criteria for defining molar neural
activation are cognitive and behavioral, namely the efficient
processing of information.
Activation is often understood as an index of information
processing that is accomplished by the distributed action of
massive sets of neurons. Actually, the practical impediments to
such recording have restricted most research to the simulta-
neous recording of a small number of neurons at most, gener-
ally too few to infer correspondences between neural activity
and information processing. Unfortunately, the relation of mo-
lar activation to individual neural units or modules is poorly
understood. Information processing may actually require as
much inhibition of individual units and modules as activation.
Furthermore, the activation of one neuron may be defined by
an increase in neural firing rate, but the activation of another
neuron may be defined simply by a shift in the membrane
polarization unaccompanied by spiking. Neurons may be acti-
vated or inhibited by interneurons with which they have no
synaptic contact as well as by the more familiar synaptic spike.
In short, the translation from neural to cognitive and behavioral
 98 JOHN ANTROBUS
activation becomes increasingly complex as one moves from
molar to microneuronal levels. The next section reviews the
similarities and differences in molar, nonlocal, or distributed
cortical activation in waking and sleep, where the EEG has
provided the traditional indices of activation.
Distributed Cortical Activation in Waking
and REM Sleep
The frequency spectra of the cortical EEG in sleep and in
waking with eyes open are almost indistinguishable, and their
common profile of EEG desynchrony is supported by a similar
cholinergic activation pattern in the midbrain reticular forma-
tion (MRF; see Figures 1 and 2) and by the ascending reticular
activating system (ARAS) originally described by Moruzzi and
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Magoun (1949).
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Desynchronization refers to the diminution or suppression
of synchronous, cyclic cortical EEG waves of generally elevated
amplitude. The synchronous waves delta (0.5-2 Hz) and theta
(4-6 Hz), which typify NREM sleep, and alpha (8-12 Hz),
which is common in the sleep-waking transition, are generated
in the cortex but are under the control of subcortical structures.
The suppression of the synchronous waves putatively permits
individual cortical neurons to act independently and therefore
frees them to transmit and process information (Paisley &
Summerlee, 1984). In this sense, desynchronization is assumed
to index both cortical and cognitive activation. Nevertheless,
the precise relationship between desynchronization and neural
information processing for each of the major synchronous fre-
quency bands is not yet known. Although this relationship is
generally accepted for the waking state, it is certainly question-
able with respect to the sleep state. For example, during waking
an increase in EEG alpha waves is generally associated with
closure of the eyes, with drowsiness, or even with the transition
to sleep, whereas during sleep an increment in alpha waves is
associated with incipient awakening and, by implication, an
increase in activation.
To understand the functional relation of cortical de-
synchronization to active cognitive processing it may be helpful
to identify the behavior of single cells in the shift from synchro-
nization to desynchronization. Although this process is not
clearly described for EEG alpha waves and delta waves, Hobson
and Steriade (1986) proposed a model for the desynchroniza-
tion of spindles, a prominent feature of NREM sleep in the cat.
They proposed that the rhythmic activity of NREM sleep spin-
dles is produced by a calcium-mediated excitation which elicits
a potassium-mediated late hyperpolarization, followed by a
postinhibitory rebound. Because no information can be trans-
mitted during hyperpolarization, all spindling neurons are es-
sentially inactivated with respect to information processing.
Krnjevic, Pumain, and Renaud (1971) argued that acetylcho-
line reduces neural "membrane permeability to potassium,
thus causing an increase in overall resistance and facilitating
the depolarization effects of synaptic input" (Hobson & Ster-
iade, 1986, p. 767). This acetylcholine-mediated effect is initi-
ated in mesencephalic reticular formation (mRF) neurons,
which project to the intralaminar and ventromedial thalamic
cells and, in turn, to the superficial part of layer one of the
cortex. From there it extends back down to the deep, neuron-
rich cortical layers. This simplified summary of the Hobson
and Steriade model describes only one of several mechanisms
of MRF-mediated, distributed, but specific cortical activation
(see Figure 1). The term distributed implies the collective activ-
ity of cortical neurons over an area at least as large as a major
portion of a cortical lobe and possibly as large as the entire
cortex. The term specific indicates that the activation is re-
stricted to an area much smaller than the entire cortex.
Although the subcortical structures responsible for EEG de-
synchronization in sleep were initially thought to be distinct
from the ARAS of Moruzzi and Magoun (1949), it is now estab-
lished (Hobson, 1965; Steriade, Ropert, Kitsikis, & Oakson,
1980; Steriade, Sakai, & Jouvet, 1984) that part of the MRF
includes cells that discharge at high tonic rates in both waking
and REM sleep in the absence of large motor activity. These
cells are organized to function as a center for distributed corti-
cal activation; they receive multiple synaptic inputs, they pro-
ject to the thalamocortical locations that are thought to control
cortical EEG, and their activity precedes cortical EEG de-
synchronization (see Figures 1 and 2).
In a review of the brain stem control of REM sleep, Vertes
(1984) argued that there are strong similarities in the REM
sleep and waking brain stem control of PGO spikes and hori-
zontal saccadic EMs. He further reviewed the evidence that the
pontine gigantocellular tegmental field (FTG) reticular forma-
tion (RF) neurons have similar discharge patterns in REM
sleep and waking, and likewise, that FTG neurons in the me-
dulla fire at high rates within both REM sleep and waking. He
concluded that "each of the events of REM represents analo-
gous or identical types of activity occurring during wakeful-
ness. . . . REM may not be an entirely unique state . . . [I]ts
functions may overlap with those of waking" (Vertes, 1984, p.
279). Sampling of cortical neural unit activity across waking
and sleep states indicates that Stage 1 REM has generally high
rates of unit activity, though the pattern of specific cell groups
varies with state (Evarts, 1964).
Increasingly accurate three-dimensional measures of corti-
cal activity have recently been developed. Many of the new
techniques are indexed to neural metabolism rather than the
transient electrical activity identified by the EEG. Although
some techniques require up to 45 min for reasonable resolution
and most require that the subject's head be immobilized during
the recording period and be free of electrodes, they have begun
to yield some evidence concerning sleep stage differences in
cortical and subcortical activation. Kanzow, Krause, and Kuh-
nel (1962) reported an increase in cortical blood flow in REM
sleep relative to NREM or slow-wave sleep in cats. Although
their sample sizes in Stage 1 REM were small, studies of re-
gional cerebral blood flow in a small sample of human subjects
across states also show that cerebral blood flow may be as high
or higher than in the waking state (Sakai, Meyer, Karacan,
Derman, & Yamamoto, 1979; Townsend, Prinz, & Obrist,
1973). Vern, Schuette, Leheta, Juel, and Radulovacki (1987) re-
cently verified the association of cortical blood flow and cere-
bral metabolism during waking, REM, and NREM. Ramm
and Frost (1983,1986), using [14C]2-deoxyglucose as an index
of regional metabolic activity, found that the reticular core, the
substantia nigra, the hippocampal dentate fascia, and the stra-
tum molecular, as well as parts of the extrapyramidal system,
showed increased activity during REM sleep in rats. Franck,
 DREAMING: COGNITIVE AND CORTICAL PROCESSES 99

CEREBRAL CORTEX
Motor Conceptual Perceptual
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This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

RET1CULAR FORMATION
MIDBRAIN

EXCITATORY

Figure 1. Neural system in the waking state. (Perc. = perceptual; Sens. = sensory; FTG = gigantocellular
tegmental field; FTC = central tegmental field; TRC = tegmental reticular nucleus; RN = raphe nucleus;
PBL = parabrachial zone; LC = locus coeruleus.)

Salmon, Poirrier, Sadzot, Franco, and Maquet (1987) recently
reported a positron emission tomography (PET) study of 2 hu-
man subjects. Cerebral metabolism rates in REM sleep were
about 5% higher than during waking, whereas NREM sleep
values were 30% lower than waking rates.
Although PET, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), and
neuromagnetic field techniques are ideally suited to measure
local activation of cortical and subcortical activation, they are
difficult to coordinate with the apparatus necessary (i.e., EEG
electrodes) to identify sleep stages. Furthermore, the recording
time necessary to achieve accurate resolution of cerebral activ-
ity is too long to permit a close match to the time interval from
which the thought and imagery of the awakened sleeper are
reported. PET also exposes subjects to nuclear radiation. These
handicaps notwithstanding, the overall picture is that the corti-
cal structures that support associative cognitive processing are
similarly activated in waking and in REM sleep, but markedly
reduced in NREM sleep.
The Subcortical Control of States
The activation or desynchronization of the cortical EEG is
initiated by the discharge of rostrally projecting MRF neurons
 100 JOHN ANTROBUS
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BRACHIUM
CONJUNCITVUM

RETICULAR FORMATION
TONTINE MIDBRAIN
OCULOMOTOR
SYSTEM CHOUNERG1C/
BRAIN STEM
SKELETAL SYSTEM
MUSCLES FTG,FTCTRC
(Er.cept eyes
and respiration)

PONS
off
NORADRENERQC
BRAIN STEM
SYSTEM
RN,PBL,LC

BULBAR/MEDULLA

LEGEND
INHIBITORY
EXOTATORY

Figure 2. Neural system in Stage 1 REM sleep. (Perc. = perceptual; Sens. = sensory; FTG = gigantocellular
tegmental field; FTC = central tegmental field; TRC = tegmental reticular nucleus; RN = raphe nucleus;
PBL = parabrachial zone; LC = locus coeruleus.)

(see Figure 2), which project to the medial thalamus, then to
pyramidal and nonpyramidal cortical interneurons, and fi-
nally to the excitatory and inhibitory cortical neurons that pro-
cess cognitive information (Steriade, Kitsikis, & Oakson, 1978;
Steriade et al., 1984). The prominent role of the neurotransmit-
ter acetylcholine and cholinergic agonists throughout this acti-
vating system has led Hobson and his colleagues to identify it as
a cholinergic/cholinoceptive system, although acetylcholine is
not itself present throughout the system. Hobson and McCarley
(1977) and Hobson, Lydic, and Baghdoyan (1986) have argued
that the control of MRF activation within REM sleep is distrib-
uted among a set of cholinergic-rich nuclei in the pontine and
 DREAMING: COGNITIVE AND CORTICAL PROCESSES
medulla, or bulbar RF (see Figure 2). In order of decreasing
concentration, these neurons lie in the FTG, the central teg-
mental field, and the tegmental reticular nucleus. In contrast to
the tonic activity of MRF neurons in waking and REM sleep,
the pontine RF cholinergic neurons "discharge phasically, with
highest rates during oculomotor events in desynchronized sleep
but also during some waking movements" (Hobson et al., 1986,
p. 743). The contrast is most dramatic (1:40-50) when the wak-
ing control states are obtained from a restrained animal. Dur-
ing REM sleep, the highest rate of FTG discharge is during
EMs and PGO activity.
The critical issue for a model of sleep state control and for the
control of REM imagery and thought is whether the FTG plays
a major role in initiating REM sleep and the phasic events of
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REM sleep, or whether it merely follows motor activity. Hobson
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and Steriade (1986) argued that
the pontine brain stem is necessary for desynchronized sleep. . .
[and that]. . . within the brain stem, cells in the pontine reticular
formation have long phase leads over both the tonic and phasic
phenomena of REM sleep. Pontine reticular cells begin to in-
crease discharge rate dramatically during synchronized sleep sev-
eral minutes before the occurrence of desynchronized-sleep epi-
sodes and long before any discharge-rate changes are seen in other
cell groups. This period of neuronal activation onset occurs with-
out muscle atonia and without movement. The question thus be-
comes, if the pontine reticular cells are simply follower cells, what
are they following, because there is no movement and also no
sensory feedback from movement, (pp. 779-780)
Opposing the cholinergic/cholinoceptive REM network,
Hobson and McCarley (1977) and Hobson et al. (1986) have
proposed for NREM sleep a distributed noradrenergic network
centered in norepinephrine (NE)- and serotonin-rich neurons
concentrated in the dorsal Raphe nucleus, peribrachial region,
and locus coeruleus (LC; see Figure 3). The two states of sleep,
REM and NREM, which alternate in 90-min cycles throughout
sleep, are controlled by two sets of brain stem generators. In
brief, their model describes two intermingled control areas,
each with cells distributed across several nuclei. At sleep onset,
the noradrenergic network, apparently controlled by the LC
and DRN, inhibits the second center, concentrated in the mRF.
The mRF controls the cholinergic/cholinoceptive network that
activates several thalamic nuclei, including the medial and in-
tralaminar thalamic nuclei (Hobson et al., 1986) that in turn
desynchronize the cerebral cortex, activating excitatory and in-
hibitory cortical neurons in both waking and sleep.
Although this effect has generally been regarded as distrib-
uted, Hobson and Steriade (1986) cautioned that the distinctive-
ness of the cortical projections of different thalamic nuclei
imply that the thalamocortical pathways are "a widespread but
highly specific network" (p. 725). Indeed, "at the level of extra-
cellular recording, there is no visible difference in the mecha-
nisms of cortical activation observed during REM sleep and
waking" (Hobson et al., 1986, p. 379). Microinjections of the
MRF with cholinergic agonists desynchronize the cortical
EEG (Baghdoyan, Rodrigo-Angulo, McCarley, & Hobson,
1984). By contrast, when the noradrenergic network is domi-
nant and the cholinergic/cholinoceptive network is inhibited,
the medial thalamic nuclei are underactivated and the cerebral
cortex displays the slow, high-voltage, rhythmic EEG that char-
101
acterizes the NREM EEG. But inhibiting the cholinergic/cho-
linoceptive control center deprives the control center of its own
source of activation so that it eventually loses its ability to sus-
tain its inhibitory influence. Freed from inhibition, the mRF-
based center again activates the thalamus and cortex to produce
Stage 1 REM sleep.
The great paradox of REM sleep is that the cortex appears to
be as active as that of a waking person, yet the person is rela-
tively unresponsive to external stimuli. The solution to this puz-
zle is that the cholinergic activation pattern of REM sleep in-
cludes at least two subsystems not activated in waking, and
these subsystems inhibit both sensory input and motor execu-
tion during REM sleep. Jones and Cuello (1989) recently
showed that one branch of cholinergic pathways activates sites
that inhibit the execution of motor commands (Morrison &
Pompeiano, 1965) and is possibly responsible for the wide-
spread sensory inhibition characteristic of REM sleep. The sub-
system controls the "powerful postsynaptic inhibition of the
brain stem and final-common-path motoneurons" (Hobson et
al., 1986, p. 379), which tonically restrain all skeletal movement
except eye movements and respiration (Pompeiano, 1967). This
inhibition, mediated by discharges of the MRF and anteriodor-
sal pontine tegmentum (Hobson et al., 1986), has the effect in
REM sleep of canceling the execution of all motor commands
initiated by the motor cortex (cf. Figures 1 and 2). The neuro-
cognitive implications of MRF-cholinergic/cholinoceptive ac-
tivation in sleep, then, are the activation of those cortical areas
concerned with cognitive processes extending from the later
stages of perceptual analysis (Perceptual^) to motor com-
mands and the inhibition of all sensory input to this system,
including inhibition of proprioceptive feedback from motor
commands.
The relation between sensory and central activation in
NREM sleep appears to be quite the reverse of the REM pat-
tern. The cortex is less active and sensory thresholds are higher
than in all other sleep states. To explain this paradox one needs
to examine the behavioral correlates of the NE network in the
waking state. Bloom (1979), Aston-Jones and Bloom (1981),
Foote, Bloom, and Aston-Jones (1983), and Tucker and Wil-
liamson (1984) have proposed that the NE network, which is
largely controlled by the LC, plays a major role in the early
stages of selective perception in the waking state. Bloom (1979)
demonstrated that NE increases the sensitivity of cortical neu-
rons to sensory input and that LC projections phasically aug-
ment d' (i.e., the signal-to-noise ratio) in sensory-perceptual
analysis(Bloom, 1980). Footeetal. (1983) showed that NEselec-
tively augments cells' evoked response to sensory input and
inhibits the spontaneous background activity of surrounding
neurons. Foote (1986) suggested that the release of NE in the
waking state "facilitates vigilance processes, that is, maximal
attention to external stimuli and minimal control of various
brain regions by autoactivation, recurrent networks, recruit-
ment, or 'intrinsic' processes" (p. 405). Tucker and Williamson
(1984) made a strong case for a noradrenergic, LC-controlled
network, populated with rapidly habituating neurons that bias
the sensitivity of the organism in favor of stimulus change or
novelty.
In summary, this binary sleep model consists of alternating
REM-NREM, cholinoceptive/noradrenergic activation pat-
 102 JOHN ANTROBUS

CEREBRAL CORTEX
Motor Conceptual Perceptual
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This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

RETICUtAR FORMATION
MIDBRAIN

INHIBITORY
EXOTATORY

Figure 3. Neural system in non-REM (NREM) sleep. (FTG = gigantocellular tegmental field; FTC =
central tegmental field; TRC = tegmental reticular nucleus; RN = raphe nucleus; PEL = parabrachial
zone; LC = locus coeruleus.)

terns, the first of which is associated with the wakinglike de-
synchronized cortical EEG, which earns it the label paradoxical
sleep. This REM sleep state is characterized by a pattern of
cognitive activation that corresponds to waking processes that
extend from Perceptual^ through to motor commands. Al-
though the precise starting point of Perceptual^ is difficult to
define, it excludes the retina and optic nerve, the middle ear,
vestibular system, and somatic afferents (Pompeiano, 1970). In
the visual system it may start as early as the LGN or the fourth
layer of the occipital cortex.
The pontine-to-cortical activation pattern of NREM sleep
seems to be confined to Perceptually processes such as stimu-
lus selection and precategorical processes. Although the subjec-
tive or conscious characteristics of these processes may be negli-
gible, they may nonetheless use a substantial portion of cortical
activity. The next section attempts to map this neurophysiologi-
cal picture onto some of the characteristics of spontaneous
nonperceptual imagery and thought.
Activation, Imagery, and Thought Across
Sleep Stages and Waking
The finding that initially suggested that general cortical and
general cognitive activation might be fundamental to the pro-
 DREAMING: COGNITIVE AND CORTICAL PROCESSES
duction of Stage 1 REM mentation was the REM-NREM re-
port-pair study mentioned earlier (Antrobus, 1983). Although
the global judgment, as measured by the Dreaming Scale, was
the best discriminator of the REM-NREM pairs, the length of
the verbal report, as measured by the Total Recall Count (TRC)
Scale, was only 1% behind, correctly discriminating 92.5% of
the 73 pairs, F = 196. But when TRC was partialed out of
dreaming, the residual dreaming variance was trivial. In other
words, the extent to which dreaming discriminated between
Stage 1 REM and Stage 2 REM was almost totally a function of
the total information produced by the sleeper, and TRC is there-
fore a plausible index of cognitive activation.
When TRC was partialed out of the Visual Word Count
Scales (nouns, action verbs, modifiers, and spatial preposi-
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tions), the REM-NREM visual imagery difference completely
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disappeared. In a recent analysis of the same report set (Rein-
sel, Antrobus, & Wollman, in press), the bizarreness distinction
between REM and NREM reports was similarly erased by par-
tialing out TRC. These results suggest that dreamlike menta-
tion might be produced throughout the night, but only during
REM sleep is the association cortex sufficiently active to sup-
port a lengthy mentation report.
The pattern of relations between wakingand sleep mentation
is altogether congruent with the neurophysiological picture.
Antrobus, Reinsel, and Wollman (1984) found that REM re-
ports are surprisingly similar in most respects to mentation
sampled from the waking state under identical laboratory con-
ditions. If mentation from three states is judged for its dream-
like quality, waking and REM are virtually indistinguishable,
and both are much more dreamlike than Stage 2. Waking re-
ports tend to be somewhat longer than REM reports, but the
latter tend to be more hallucinatory and bizarre (Reinsel et al,
in press). Judges seem to weigh length and storylike quality
against the hallucinatory and bizarre qualities to judge waking
and REM reports equally dreamlike.
The major cognitive distinction between waking and REM
reports is that waking reports have more frequent shifts in the
Topic Scale count (Reinsel, Wollman, & Antrobus, 1986),
whereas the primary distinction between REM and Stage 2
mentation reports is that the former are much longer, that is,
have higher TRC counts per report. Waking reports are distin-
guished from Stage 2 reports both by higher TRC and more
topics.
If the traditional global variable, dreaming, had alone been
used in the studies of Reinsel et al. (in press) and Wollman and
Antrobus (1987), only one of the state differences would have
been identified, and it would have been misinterpreted as a
difference in a complex class of fantasy production, namely,
dreaming, rather than simply a difference in the amount of
information generated and stored. To identify the possible
neurocognitive links in the domain of human sleep mentation,
one must, therefore, relinquish the generic term "dreaming" in
favor of a set of more precisely defined cognitive measures such
as total information reported, brightness of visual imagery, and
so forth.
The late morning dream effect recently reported by Kondo
(1988; Kondo, Antrobus, & Fein, 1989) shows that TRC in both
REM and NREM late morning reports obtained 3 hr later than
on control nights is significantly elevated. The two sources of
activation, the REM-NREM increment and that of the rising
103
morning phase of the diurnal rhythm, are additive. The dream-
like quality of REM reports are intensified to a degree rarely
seen in laboratory reports. Even NREM reports become longer
and the imagery becomes more vivid. The argument that both
the REM and the morning rhythm increments in TRC are acti-
vation effects is strengthened by the fact that both cortical
states are driven by the MRF (Figures 1 and 2).
The NREM increment found by Kondo et al. (1989) echoes
Zimmerman's (1970) finding that, relative to normal sleepers,
the NREM reports of light sleepers (i.e, people with low sen-
sory thresholds during sleep) were more dreamlike. By using a
measure of activation, namely the rising phase of the diurnal
cycle, that is free of the confound of cortical activation and
sensory and motor inhibition, however, Kondo et al. were able
to demonstrate an incremental effect of activation on menta-
tion in both REM and NREM sleep.
Despite the broad research support for the position that cor-
tical desynchronization indexes cognitive activation, the evi-
dence is not unanimous. Wollman and Antrobus (1987) failed
to support it when they examined within-state correlations, in
both REM and waking, between TRC and EEC spectral power.
Subjects were interrupted three or more times within each state
for a mentation report. EEG power was computed in each of
the standard EEG bands for windows extending for 1 to 5 min
prior to the interruption. After normalizing the power values
within each subject, the values were correlated with TRC values
for the interruptions. None were significant, p > .05, N = 30.
To summarize, dreaming in its strongest form is character-
ized by visual imagery that is bright, clearly focused, colored,
and moving; by a storylike conceptual theme that is almost
always perceived as a "real" event (i.e., it is hallucinatory); and
by its sometimes bizarre quality. The magnitude of these quali-
ties varies over time within sleep as a function of the activated
phases of two biological rhythms, the 90-min REM-NREM
sleep cycle and the 24-hr diurnal sleep wake rhythm, which
reaches its upper limit when REM sleep is sustained into the
late morning hours when the waking diurnal rhythm of the RF
provides additional activation to the cerebral cortex without a
corresponding increment in the inhibitory processes of REM
sleep.
If this increase in cortical activation were accompanied by an
equivalent increase in all thequalitiesof waking perception and
thought, the bizarreness of dreaming, to the extent that it repre-
sents a failure of the production process, should completely
disappear. But surprisingly, bizarreness increases with increas-
ing activation, both within REM sleep and waking, under zero
illumination conditions. It is proposed here that bizarre events
illustrate the partial independence of a low-level visual produc-
tion module from top-down conceptual influence, and the in-
termittent inability of the conceptual model to provide a plausi-
ble interpretation of these out-of-context visual productions.
The Production of Conceptual Thought and Imagery
Visual imagery is produced by the activation of some part of
the visual perception system when it is dark-adapted and not
processing visual sensory stimuli. These conditions are satis-
fied not only in REM sleep, but also in waking, in a light-proof
environment. Whether the perceptual and cognitive modules
that produce visual imagery and conceptual thought are
 104 JOHN ANTROBUS
equally well activated by increasing cortical activation during
REM is difficult to determine on the basis of existing research.
At low levels of activation, denned by TRC, subjects appear to
report images that they identify by name only at the time of
making the report. There seems to be no recognized context,
no story line, and no interpretation while asleep. At interme-
diate levels of activation subjects seem to be able to recognize or
identify their imagery while asleep, but only with difficulty.
The names of objects are often prefaced with "sort of like" or
"kind of a." This difficulty in categorization suggests that
image production is not necessarily initiated or controlled by a
higher level conceptual or semantic process. At higher levels of
activation, images are identified but sometimes seen as poor or
even bizarre exemplars of the person or object they portray, and
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sometimes seem out of place in the thematic context of the
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dream sequence. In short, the amount of information in the
visual image implies the participation of a top-down process in
its construction. Yet the lack of effective quality control over the
form of the image suggests that the lower level processes exer-
cise a considerable degree of independence, implying that the
process of image production described in waking studies of
instructed imagery (Kosslyn, 1988) may differ considerably
from that of REM sleep.
One possible explanation for the shift in the strength of visual
processes relative to conceptual processes with increasing acti-
vation within REM sleep is that conceptual structures may be
handicapped by the REM state inhibition of interaction with
the sensorimotor components of the speech apparatus. Con-
ceptual and linguistic processes are intricately related to vocal
and acoustic processes. For example, Klapp, Marshburn, and
Lester (1983) demonstrated the operation of both acoustic and
articulatory loops in working memory Although these loops
have not been examined in sleep, all sensory and proprioceptive
afferents that have been studied have shown marked attenua-
tion in REM sleep (Pompeiano, 1970). Furthermore, Orem
(1977) has shown that laryngeal muscle tonus in cats is greatly
reduced relative to wakefulness and NREM sleep. Unfortu-
nately, the patterns of motor inhibition in REM are somewhat
species specific, and there are no comparable data on humans
or on a time-of-night effect.
Nevertheless, there is good reason to suspect that both activ-
ity and feedback from speech production centers are inhibited
in REM sleep and that this inhibition impairs the ability of
conceptual and linguistic modules to generate abstract thought
in REM sleep. Only at high levels of cortical activation, namely
when the rising phase of the diurnal cortical activation rhythm
summates with the REM phase of the sleep rhythm, is this
inhibition likely to be partly overcome.
There are several interesting dream phenomena that may be
controlled by this inhibition of afferent input to the cortex.
Subjects often report that some of their REM experience is
much like passively watching television, whereas they actively
participate in the action of other dreams, and in still others they
watch themselves participate. Imaged physical participation in
the dream may depend on feedback from larger skeletal muscu-
lature. Conceptual-verbal dreams may be dependent on feed-
back from subcortical speech centers. The passive watching of
images may well identify a default condition when propriocep-
tive feedback is strongly inhibited.
The inhibition of motor activation in REM sleep has often
been proposed as the basis for the dreamer's experience of be-
ing unable to move even when the intention to run is the appro-
priate response to an imaged villain. The motor cortex is able
to issue the command to run, but its execution is inhibited. The
sensation of being immobilized is created by the absence of the
appropriate afferent feedback from the skeletal muscles that
would normally execute the response.
At high levels of late morning REM activation the inhibition
of skeletal muscles and motor feedback may be partly overcome
and the dreamer may become more aware of the remaining
inhibition. Indeed, the dreamer may even manage the spastic
kick of the motor run action and escape from dreaming to
wakefulness. The clustering of "lucid" dreaming, the experi-
ence of simultaneously being awake while dreaming (LaBerge,
1985) in the last hour of sleep, supports this conception. Antro-
bus, Antrobus, and Fisher (1965) and LaBerge (1985) have been
able to train some subjects to make a manual signal when they
are asleep and dreaming, and the majority of such responses are
produced in the final hour of REM sleep.
Even at a high level of activation, image production by lower
level visual modules is only partly under the control of top-
down cognitive processes, so that waking visual images often
fail to match the subjective expectation or subvocal commands
of the imager (Perky, 1910; Segal, 1971). Moreover, the ability of
the waking imager or daydreamer to distinguish his or her own
images from perceptual patterns is a function of the strength of
the sensory stimulus. It is not surprising, therefore, that the
REM dreamer, deprived of external visual stimuli because of
the elevated REM thresholds, has no option but to interpret the
image as a veridical perception and respond appropriately. Pre-
sented with visual information that is out of context, concep-
tual processes apparently act simultaneously to revise the
meaning context to make it more consistent with the image and
to modify or reinterpret the image to minimize the mismatch
with the conceptual context. Each imposes constraints on the
other.
The process of interpreting information in the context of
other information is reminiscent of the synthesis process which
Hobson and McCarley (1977) introduced to explain how EM
information transmitted to the cortex by PGO waves is incorpo-
rated into the ongoing dream. This cognitive process of finding
a congenial solution for a pattern of information, some seg-
ments of which may be in conflict with each other, may be a
primary attribute of all perception and thought, and it is a
central focus of the connectionist models that are described
later. But in contrast to a synthesis process applied exclusively
to PGO inputs, I show later that imagery and conceptual
thought are continuously produced by some explicit form of
synthesis or constraint satisfaction (Rumelhart, Smolensky,
McClelland, & Hinton, 1986) among all of the activated partici-
pating modules.
The thematic coherence of most dream reports suggests that
the production process, including visual image production, is
under the control of a top-down process. Indeed, this assump-
tion is the basis for the widespread practice of dream interpre-
tation. 1 would like to suggest that the contribution of top-
down processes (i.e., the output of a conceptual module) has
been overemphasized relative to the influence of bottom-up
 DREAMING: COGNITIVE AND CORTICAL PROCESSES
processes, particularly the output of the visual module. (The
term module will refer hereinafter to a set of interconnected
elementary units dedicated to a particular class of information
processing. Modules may pass information to one another, but
the connections between elementary units of adjacent models
are comparatively sparse relative to the dense interconnections
within modules. Although module is used as a cognitive term,
the phrase cortical module is also used to refer to a specific
cortical location where the functional property of that area is
well established.)
There is good reason to assume that the conceptual and vi-
sual modules jointly accommodate each other in order to syn-
thesize the multiple, overlapping schemata into a single coher-
ent schema. The impression that the conceptual module con-
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trols this synthesis may be an illusion fostered by the
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remarkable facility of the conceptual module to construct in-
terpretations and event scenarios that minimize the discrepan-
cies between the two modules.
To the extent that this synthesis is an interactive process, and
no single metric for scaling the two processes exists, it is not
possible at this time to estimate their relative contribution to
the construction of spontaneous imagery. Nevertheless, if one
assumes that during waking visual perception the conceptual
module is biased to accommodate the visual module which, in
turn, is biased to respond to sensory input, and if one further
assumes that visual imagery is produced jointly by both mod-
ules when there is no retinal input to the visual module, then
one may infer that the bias of the conceptual module carries
over to the imagery condition when there is no sensory input.
To the extent that the visual component of mentation is
stronger in REM sleep than in any other state, one may also
infer that the spontaneous activity of the visual module, or
some portion thereof, makes a strong independent contribu-
tion to the dream imagery that the two modules jointly produce
in REM sleep.
Although this interpretive process may be inferred post hoc
from REM dream reports, it is demonstrated more convinc-
ingly by the presentation of external stimuli during sleep. Be-
cause the response to visual stimuli is strongly inhibited, even
when the eyelids are taped open and the pupils are dilated,
other sensory modalities must be addressed. After administer-
ing a fine spray of cold water on subjects who were in REM
sleep, Dement and Wolpert (1958) obtained reports such as
I was walking behind the leading lady, when she suddenly col-
lapsed and water was dripping on her. I ran over to her and felt
water dripping on my back and head. The roof was leaking.... I
looked up and there was a hole in the roof. I dragged her over to
the s i d e . . . . 1 woke up. (p. 550)
Another subject reported
. . . children came into the room and came over to me asking for
water. I had a glass of ice water and I tipped the glass to give it to
them. I was sitting, and I spilled the water on myself. The children
wanted the ice and tried to grab it, but it slipped away. I got mad
because they were so greedy and tried to shove them away. . . .
Then I got out of the chair and was going to change my pants,
(p. 550)
I suggest that not only is the interpretation of the self-ini-
tiated productions of the visual module in REM sleep a similar
105
process to the interpretation of external stimuli, but that this
interpretation is the conceptual stuff of the dream. Even when
no external stimuli are imposed, the reported dream event sug-
gests that the cognitive module has a challenging job in provid-
ing plausible interpretations for the images produced by the
visual module. For example, a dreamer reports,". . .small per-
sons, evidently children in years but with aged and deeply lined
f a c e s . . . . It dawned on me that this. . . was a house of correc-
tion; the aged children were unfortunates who had grown upon
the streets.. . ." (Hobson, 1988, p. 274). I am suggesting that
the visual module produced small people and lined faces but
that the conceptual module was obliged to produce a scenario
or schema that would jointly satisfy the visual constraints, the
prior conceptual context of the dream, namely a large public
building, and the world knowledge available from the sleeper's
memory.
Although these examples illustrate the facility of the sleeper's
conceptual interpretation, they in no way diminish the likeli-
hood that a similar interpretive process is carried out at lower
levels, such as early perceptual but nonsensory, kinaesthetic,
and visual processing, which are inaccessible to introspection.
Such early processes might include the construction of visual
features, such as a lined surface, that are in turn interpreted into
objects or persons. In short, this interpretive process may be a
fundamental characteristic of the perceptual cognitive system.
In the final section of this article I show how this process might
be accomplished by translating the concepts of synthesis and
interpretation into the more precise operations of constraint
satisfaction.
Bizarre and Anomalous Imagery and Thought
in REM Sleep
Although bizarreness is popularly regarded as one of the
most salient characteristics of dreaming, it is not particularly
prominent in laboratory REM reports except when they are
obtained in the late morning hours (Rondo et al, 1989), when
the cortex reaches its highest level of REM sleep activation.
Furthermore, the fact that the major subscales of the Bizarre-
ness Scale, such as Improbable Combinations of visual features,
occur with equal frequency in REM (mean = 0.34/report) and
waking (0.36/report), under matched conditions of zero lumi-
nance in a sound-attenuated chamber (WakingMC), implies that
a high level of cortical activation is a necessary condition for the
production of bizarre mentation. The same is true for the Dis-
continuities subscale (low-probability sequences within the
dream). Reported discontinuities are usually prefaced with,
". . . and all of a sudden." Although fairly common in REM
sleep (0.48/report), they are twice as frequent in quiet WakingMC
(0.93/report).
To the extent that bizarreness is a form of cognitive error and
is associated with heightened cortical activation in both REM
sleep and WakingMC, one may ask what condition is necessary
for its occurrence. The absence of external visual stimuli seems
to be the essential requirement. Waking visual perception is a
conceptual interpretation of the output of lower level visual
processing modules for form, movement, depth, color, and so
forth, whose coherence with one another is imposed in part by
the temporal and spatial regularities of the external world. Al-
 106 JOHN ANTROBUS
though conceptual modules may exercise some control on the
lower level visual and spatial modules, the control is apparently
limited. In the absence of sensory input, the visual module or
modules are apparently able, when sufficiently activated, to
produce images on their own. But these modules are special-
ized for spatial rather than temporal analysis. Therefore, in the
absence of external sensory constraints, they tend to produce
quality visual images but also produce temporal sequences that
arc sometimes implausible.
Imaginal Sequences
Although the production of sequences and the perceptual
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expectation of sequential events is not well understood, one
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may assume that the information used to produce imagined
sequences includes both parallel distributed information as
well as sequential information. One may further assume that in
the absence of sensory input, the input to the system is its own
prior output. That is. its state at time ( + 1 is a function of its
state at time t. Of particular interest here are the ways of model-
ing distributed sequential processes both within and between
visual, motor, and conceptual modules. A further concern is to
avoid the assumption that image sequences are produced only
by the conscious components of imagination. It seems likely
that the imaginal properties of which one is aware are a small
but undetermined fraction of the total information that con-
trols the production of the successive images in an image se-
quence.
The ability of one imaged event j to cue a second image k
undoubtedly depends on the amount of information carried by
the imaged event and on the strength of the learned connec-
tions between events j and k. If the image of j carries as much
information as the corresponding perceived event j, then the
probability, p(k), of a particular successive image should be the
same whether event j is an image or a percept and should be
constrained only by the strength of the learned connections to
image k. If, in the course of waking perception, the expectation
of event k is not confirmed by external sensory input, the per-
cept at time t + 1 is corrected. But in an imaginal sequence, no
sensory data are available to correct the expectation, so that the
image at t 4 1 becomes the cue for the image at t + 2, and the
image at t + 2 becomes the cue for the image at t + 3, and so
forth.
Johnson, Foley, Suengas, and Raye (1988) recently showed
that the memory for an imagined event contains less sensory
information than the memory of a perception. One may de-
duce, therefore, that relative to a waking percept, a dream
image will impose weaker constraints on the production of a
subsequent image. The cumulative effect of this decreased con-
straint over successive images should be that the imagined se-
quences wander or progressively deviate from the path of a
real-world sequence that starts from the same point.
In addition to the information attenuation that may be char-
acteristic of waking images, REM sleep images are impover-
ished by an additional factor which has been previously de-
scribed. The inhibition at the spinal level of motor commands,
including speech, and the additional inhibition of kinaesthetic
feedback effectively el iminate a major source of feedback that is
assumed, in the waking state, to constrain an individual's own
speech and other motor behavior.
To simplify this discussion, I have described the production
of sleep imagery and thought as Stage 1 REM phenomena. It is
more accurate, but still an oversimplification, to say that
NREM mentation is produced by the same process but at a
much attenuated magnitude. In the next section I compare the
cognitive and neural differences between the two sleep states in
more detail.
NREM Versus REM Mentation
Almost all NREM mentation reports are obtained from
Stage 2 because Stage 2 makes up the majority of NREM sleep
and is evenly distributed throughout the night. NREM sleep is
defined by a relatively high-voltage, slow-frequency, synchro-
nized cortical EEC, which lacks the subcortical PRF activation
source that activates the association and motor cortex in REM
sleep and waking (cf. Figure 3 with Figures 1 and 2; Hobson &
McCarley, 1977; Hobson & Steriade, 1986). Dreaming is re-
ported in N R E M sleep, but the probability that the informa-
tion in an NREM report, as inferred from the report length,
equals or exceeds the information in a REM report, matched by
subject and time of night, equals only 0.075 (Antrobus, 1983).
As previously described, NREM dreaming is enhanced among
people whose sleep is generally disturbed (Zimmerman, 1970)
and in normal sleepers during the very late morning hours
(Rondo et al, 1989). In both conditions the NREM pattern of
activation is no doubt supplemented by the RF-thalamic pat-
tern characteristic of REM sleep and waking.
The paradox of N R E M sleep is that while it is in one sense
the least activated sleep state, it has the lowest sensory thresh-
olds, and a subject in N R E M sleep, upon being awakened,
offers the most reports of being awake and thinking. In sum-
mary, the cortical EEG and mentation reports indicate a state
oflow activation, but the low sensory thresholds and reported
waking status imply just the opposite.
Sensory thresholds during sleep shift so rapidly following pre-
sentation of a stimulus, with the modality and personal signifi-
cance of the stimulus and with the neural and behavioral crite-
ria for the response, that its complex literature cannot be sum-
marized in this article. Note simply that Stage 2 N R E M is
notorious for its high rate of "I-was-awake" responses, which
often exceed the 50% rate during the first half of the night
(Antrobus & Saul, 1980; Bonnet & Moore, 1982; Sewitch, 1984).
The cues that subjects use for this judgment are unknown, but
mentation reports and sensory and perceptual thresholds sug-
gest that subjects in Stage 2 often have a vague recognition of
either auditory (Wills & Trinder, 1978) or somatic (Antrobus,
1986) stimuli.
Williams, Hammack, Daly, Dement, and Lubin (1964) and
Williams, Morlock, and Morlock (1966) found that subjects
exhibited lower sensory thresholds in NREM than in REM
sleep, particularly for personally nonsignificant stimuli. Antro-
bus and Saul (1980) found that subjects reported being awake
on 50% of NREM interruptions, compared to nearly 0% in
REM, a finding that was subsequently confirmed by Sewitch
(1984) and Rosekind and Schwartz (1988a, 1988b). Antrobus
(1983) found that 30% of NREM awakenings included some
 DREAMING; COGNITIVE AND CORTICAL
sense that the subject's status lay somewhere between waking
and sleep ("I was not really asleep") compared with 2% in REM
sleep. These NREM reports were very brief and unelaborated
relative to REM reports and waking reports (Wollman & An-
trobus, 1986).
However, these early perceptual responses do not seem to
initiate the elaborate conceptual sequences of either the REM
dream or waking thought. Thus, although the high rate of
"awake" responses implies that Stage 2 NREM is the most acti-
vated sleep stage, the relative cognitive impoverishment of the
reports and the low rate of recalling anything suggest that the
conceptual module is comparatively inactive in that state, ex-
cept as already noted among light or activated sleepers, or
within late morning NREM periods.
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The paradox may be resolved if one assumes that the Percep-
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tual Early stages of information processing are activated in
NREM sleep, but the output of these stages is not processed
further by the association and motor modules. Thus the sleeper
may marginally encode kinaesthetic or auditory stimuli and
conclude that he or she must be not entirely asleep, but can
describe little additional ideation.
This hypothesis is supported by several similarities in the
neurocognhive patterns of waking perceptual attention and
NREM sleep. As described earlier, the LC stands at the distri-
bution center of a widespread aminergic-rich subcortical and
cortical network (see Figure 3) that, in waking, may modulate
perceptual attention (see Bloom, 1980; Foote et al., 1983). In
waking perception, the adrenergic Perceptually and choliner-
gic Perceptual^-association-motor processing phases must
interact cooperatively. In sleep, however, the phases are func-
tionally disengaged with respect to sensory information pro-
cessing as the switching comes under subcortical control. In
NREM sleep, the cholinergic system is down, so that little fur-
ther processing of sensory input takes place. The reduced sen-
sory thresholds of NREM sleep are, therefore, a remnant of the
adrenergic-controlled early Perceptual attention processing
state of waking perception.
Summary of Empirically Supported Relationships and
Theoretical Conjectures
The imagery and thought of sleep occur periodically when,
in Stage 1 REM, subcortical processes activate in a distributed
manner a large portion of the cortical processes that, in the
waking state, compute perceptual, cognitive, and motor re-
sponses to external stimuli. Sleep imagery and thought, there-
fore, share many of the characteristics of waking responses to
sensory stimuli. These responses include the creation of percep-
tual features that are predominantly visual but also include the
auditory and haptic modalities. Also included are most of the
cognitive responses of identification or recognition, the inter-
pretation of relationships among the perceptual features, the
interpretation of the meaning of objects and event sequences,
problem solving, and the cognitive and premotor processes of
motor response.
The visual forms approach the brightness, clarity, and mobil-
ity of waking percepts. Although the forms are typically identi-
fied or recognized by the sleeper, they are judged frequently by
the sleeper as "something like" known objects or persons rather
PROCESSES 107
than good exemplars. Often they are "seen" as novel and im-
probable combinations of familiar visual features. Although
these attributes are characteristic of REM mentation, and in a
diminished form are characteristic of NREM mentation, they
can also be produced in the waking state under the identical
conditions of reduced sensory pattern stimulation.
A second set of characteristics tends to be exclusive to REM
sleep mentation and may be attributed to the very high and
prolonged afferent and motor inhibition during that stage. The
inhibition of external and proprioceptive input creates a cogni-
tive situation where the imagined percepts carry the same
weight in subsequent cognitive processes as do the perception
of external stimuli in the waking state. It is this belief in the
reality of imagined events that earns the REM experience the
label hallucinatory.
This belief in turn constrains the course of REM mentation.
Unfamiliar and improbable forms that might be automatically
tagged as fanciful or unknown if seen in the movies must be
explained when they are "seen" in the dreamer's kitchen talking
to one's mother. These interpretations in turn modify the subse-
quent sequence of the dream. If, for example, the form is inter-
preted as unknown and therefore a threat, the dreamer may
decide to make a run for it.
The decision in the motor cortex to execute a motor act,
coupled with high motor and proprioceptive inhibition, creates
the second unique characteristic of REM mentation. The mo-
tor decision is not followed by the proprioceptive feedback
from the skeletal musculature that accompanies the corre-
sponding waking act, and this mismatch is noticed by the
dreamer and interpreted as the inability to move. This interpre-
tation likewise modifies the subsequent course of the menta-
tion.
The integration of the imaged sensory, perceptual, cognitive,
motivational, and motor information into a unified experience,
a characteristic of waking perception, is also accomplished in
sleep but with a difference. In waking perception, the reliability
of the relationships among perceptual features is constrained
by the sensory patterns in the external world. In sleep, however,
these environmental constraints are absent. The constraints on
the possible relationships among features in a scene and on the
succession of events in time are dependent on prior perceptual
learning. Yet the self-produced images of REM sleep elicit the
same sense of surprise to the dreamer as do external stimuli to
the waking observer. The images are based on perceptual ex-
pectations, yet they are experienced as entirely unexpected.
This surprise or even bizarreness, which is expressed in the
temporal discontinuities and improbable spatial combinations
of features, represents the joint inability of these perceptual
expectations to adequately constrain the production of percep-
tual features and interfeature relationships. It also represents
the inability of the interpretive portion of the cognitive system
to come up with a satisfactory account for the unexpected
image relationships.
As the distributed activation of the cortex increases, one
might expect that the activation of learned constraints would
reduce the frequency of improbable events in the dream. In-
stead, paradoxically, the likelihood of such unexpected or bi-
zarre relationships increases with increased cortical activation.
Increased activation increases both the amount of information
 108 JOHN ANTROBUS
generated in the dream and also the sophistication of the
dreamer's interpretations. Apparently the enhanced activation
of the interpretive processes does not keep pace with the activa-
tion of the image production processes.
Enough is currently known about sleep imagery and thought
to acknowledge that the activation, or the active inhibition, of
every part of the interactive waking sensory-perceptual-cogni-
tive-motivational-motor system is implicated in its produc-
tion. Sleep imagery and thought are produced by a periodically
altered form of the waking system. To the extent that these
sleep alterations and their effects on imagery and thought are
well understood, it is the lack of knowledge of the waking sys-
tem that limits the understanding of sleep imagery and thought
production. In the absence of such knowledge, it may be worth-
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while to use the current knowledge of both sleep and waking
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processes to model selected characteristics of the system, and
to utilize the behavior of the model to guide the selection of
future research questions.
Connectionist Models and Sleep Mentation
The connectionist models recently introduced to neuropsy-
chology (Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986) provide several pow-
erful ways to model some of the integrative processes of percep-
tion and cognition and may also be able to simulate the cogni-
tive integrative processes, as well as the integrative failures, of
REM sleep.
The conception of dreaming as a perceptionlike process car-
ries with it the assumption that perception originates in the
sense organs and that, with some top-down assistance from
conceptual and motivational loci, the dominant flow of infor-
mation is bottom-up. It is now well established, however, that
production of dreaming requires no input from the sense or-
gans, which are the starting point for waking perception. The
perceptual system, when fully activated in early morning REM
sleep, can do a remarkably good job of simulating the stream of
waking perception in real time with no sensory input. This
suggests that a perceptual model that emphasizes a serial pro-
cessing order from lower to higher level modules may not be
entirely inappropriate for dreaming. A better model for dream-
ing may be one which integrates the information both within
and between modality-specific, motivational, conceptual, and
motor modules in parallel. That is, the information in each
module constrains the processes of the others.
This integrative capability of connectionist models is specifi-
cally employed to simulate the following characteristics of
dreaming: (a) the holistic, schemalikequality of the dream expe-
rience; (b) the coherent flow of perceptionlike imagery in the
absence of sensory input; (c) local "interpretive" accommoda-
tion to the inhibition of feedback from motor decisions; (d) the
discontinuities, novelty, and bizarreness of imagery and
thought; and (e) the amplifier effects of subcortical distributed
activation on local processing.
Inasmuch as Rumelhart, Smolensky, McClelland, and Hin-
ton (1986) have demonstrated that a connectionist model based
on Hopfield's (1982) annealing model has some of the proper-
ties of schemata, this seems like a useful starting point for a
model of the formation of sleep imagery and thought.
The Single-Frame Schemata Model
A brief examination of the Rumelhart, Smolensky, McClel-
land, and Hinton (1986) schemata model, which I will label
SCHEMATA:RSMH, will introduce the reader to connection-
ist models and to the merits and limitations of a single-layered
model that computes schemata for a single time frame. A
schema is a unit of information created when smaller informa-
tion units interact to form a functional pattern. Several of these
schemata may in turn combine to form a larger schema, and so
on until a single higher order schema is formed. This superor-
dinate schema may represent the coherent unity of a conscious
experience; the subordinate schemata may represent names
and objects that are components of that experience. The sub-
schemata may represent features of the names and objects, and
the microschemata may represent microfeatures that combine
in various configurations to form a particular feature. They are
cognitively impenetrable and therefore not accessible to con-
sciousness. The smallest units of information may be small
micronetworks of neurons, but it is unnecessary to extend this
model to that level.
A powerful property of this conception of schemata derives
from several assumptions: (a) that the basic units of the schema
are subfeatural or microcognitive, (b) that these units are distrib-
uted, (c) that the processes by which they interact occur in paral-
lel, and (d) that these processes are incremental. Within the
constraints of cortical architecture and the learning history of
the model, each schema, subschema, and microschema can
accom modate the context of the other participating units. They
jointly determine not only which schemata will become active,
but most remarkably, the particular configuration each schema
will take. For example, the "horse" schema not only activates
schemata for four legs, but the four-"leg" schemata are config-
ured differently from the "leg" schemata for "dogs" and
"chairs."
This accommodation is realized by replacing the feature list
of the traditional list-processing artificial intelligence model
with a distributed set of microfeature units so that different
variations on a given feature can be constructed from different
activations of the participating microfeatures. The incremental
manner of building a schema allows each microfeature to grow
or shrink depending on the current context of the other active
microfeatures. And just as microfeatures combine to form fea-
tures, so too features combine to form the schemata of objects
and persons, and they in turn combine to form the novel sche-
mata of the superordinate schema.
Rumelhart, Smolensky, McClelland, and Hinton (1986) il-
lustrated the process of creating the schema of an entire room
from units that consist of objects that in turn consist of features.
They constructed a network of 40 items or units found in kit-
chens, bedrooms, bathrooms, and offices. For each descriptor
they estimated its bias to occur or to be active regardless of the
activity of its neighbors, and its probability of beingactive in the
presence of each of its neighbors. Using a Bayesian analysis,
they derived a matrix of weights, wt>, that represented the rela-
tion between each unit i and each other unit j in the matrix. To
satisfy Hopfield's (1982) thermodynamic model of constraint
satisfaction, they adopted the restrictive assumption that of
symmetric weights, w^ = ws,. It was assumed that the weights
 DREAMING: COGNITIVE AND CORTICAL PROCESSES
represented an individual's associative knowledge of the rela-
tions among the 40 items.
The process of constructing a schema is initiated by turning
on or activating one or two units in the net. This activation may
represent sensory input to the network or input from a network
in a sensory "pathway" When one or two units are so activated,
the activation spreads to other units to which they are con-
nected by positive weights, and inhibition will spread to other
units to which they are connected by negative weights. As acti-
vation spreads through the network in successive cycles, the
more activated units successively acquire more influence on the
developing pattern of network activation. The less activated
units, by reason of inhibition or receipt ofless activation from
surrounding units, lose influence. Although the pattern may be
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unstable at first, some subgroup of units eventually reaches a
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state in which it dominates the network and inhibits other po-
tential subgroups that might have become active if the initial
activation pattern had been different. Rumelhart, Smolensky.
McClelland, and Hinton (1986, p. 13) defined this state as a
kind of goodness-of-fit (G) or constraint satisfaction after Hop-
field (1982) where G(t) reaches an upper limit.
where ( = a point in time, i and j = any pair of units in the net,
and a = the activation level of a unit or descriptor.
The contribution of a pair of units is given by the product of their
activation values times the weights connecting them. Thus, if the
weight is positive, each unit wants to be as active as possible — that
is, the activation values for these two units should be pushed to-
ward 1 . If the weight is negative, then at least one of the units
should be 0 to maximize the pairwrie_goodness. (Rumelhart,
Smolensky, McClelland, & Hinton, i986,~vbT;2rjr-14J~'
Note that, although the input or sensory term permits the
network to respond to external information, the model will
continue to build even when the input value returns to 0. This
feature permits one to simulate an "imaginal" process by seed-
ing the network with external input and then running it for
several cycles without additional external input.
As the model iterates through successive cycles, the activa-
tion of related pairs of units extends to larger clusters of units,
and these larger clusters exert increasing influence on other
clusters of units to which their units are related by positive or
negative weights.
It is these coalitions of tightly interconnected units that corre-
spond most closely to what have been called schemata. The stable
pattern as a whole can be considered as a particular configuration
of a number of such overlapping patterns and is determined by the
dynamic equilibrium of all of these subpatterns interacting with
one another and with the inputs. Thus, the maxima in the good-
ness-of-fit space corresponds. . . , in the language of schemata,
[to] configurations of instantiated schemata. In short, they are
those states that maximize the particular set of constraints acting
at the moment. (Rumelhart, Smolensky, McClelland, & Hinton,
1986, vol. 2, pp. 20-21)
The distributed characteristic of connectionist models al-
lows a small number of microcognitive units to combine to
form a large number of possible schemata, just as the small set
of letters or sounds of a language are joined to form an almost
infinite number of words. Because new and novel images and
concepts may be produced without increasing the total number
of microunits, an infinite number of variations of an image can
109
be represented by small changes in the pattern of activation of
the microunits that contribute to the image. This ability to con-
struct novel forms suggests that connectionist models may be
well suited to represent the novel, odd, or bizarre combinations
that characterize many dream experiences.
Although the microcognitive unit may be theoretically re-
ducible to individual neurons, note that Smolensky (1988)
showed that the process of constraint satisfaction can be ap-
plied to cognitive units that are as large as features or objects so
long as the microcognitive units of the model are smaller than
the schema or outcome that they collectively construct.
There are, however, some limitations on the applicability of
SCHEMATA:RSMH to dreaming. Based on the Hopfield
(1982) model, SCHEMATA:RSMH is handicapped by its as-
sumption of symmetric weights and, as will be discussed later,
by its inability to represent nonlinear relationships among their
units. SCHEMATA:RSMH starts with the external activation
of several units and then iterates through several cycles until it
settles on a solution, at which point it stops unless activated with
new input. Moreover, once a solution is reached, it takes a very
large input pattern to disturb the network enough for it to seek a
new solution. The constraints achieved with the initial solution
simply inhibit any local disruption by new input.
By contrast, the imagery and thought of a person change
continuously in a sequential fashion and appear to represent
previously learned spatial and temporal sequences. If one visu-
alizes A, a door opening, one expects and therefore may imag-
ine B, someone coming into the room. If one sees this person
coming closer, one expects the person to speak C. To model this
sequence, A must activate B, and B must activate C; in addition,
B must inhibit A, and C must inhibit B. Clearly sequential
events cannot be represented by symmetric weights. Natural
hierarchies in the environment also defy representation by sym-
metric weights. For example, chairs are present in nearly all
kitchens, but kitchens do not occur in the presence of all chairs.
It is assumed that schemata that represent the characteristics
of dream mentation must include some of the properties of
imagery such as visual form, brightness, and color that are cus-
tomarily associated with the concept of consciousness. It is also
assumed, however, that many of the units that contribute to the
construction of schemata must represent spatial, temporal, and
abstract properties that do not have sensory or perceptual prop-
erties. Support for this assumption comes from a recent study
by Intons-Peterson and Roskos-Ewoldsen (1989), who showed
that visual imagery sequences can be under the control of non-
visual information such as the inferred weight of an object to be
carried. Thus, the imaged act of catching a ball depends not
only on the visual image of the trajectory of the ball but also on
other factors, such as one's imagined role in the process either as
an observer or as a participating player, on one's body position,
on motor decisions, and on the proprioceptive feedback from
motor behavior, which is greatly attenuated due to the inhibi-
tion of motor activity and afferent transmission in REM sleep.
Simulations
Distributed Recurrent Activation Model of Imagery and
Thought (DREAM1TS)
To simulate imaginal sequences it is first necessary to con-
struct a model that can generate schemata in the absence of the
 110 JOHN ANTROBUS

All

UNIT i
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This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

EXCITATORY
INPUT
SUB UNIT

Input
site

=21= From All From All

Excitatory Inhibitory
Units Units

Distributed to all Afferent Output Subunits

Distributed to

PONTINE RP-to-
THALAHD8,
CORTICAL
INHIBITORY
CONTROL
ONIT
ON only
in REM
Sleep

Figure 4. Organization of DREAMITS units. (RF = reticular formation.)

concurrent "sensory" or "perceptual" input that was simulated
in the SCHEMATA:RSMH model with its set of units clamped
on throughout the construction of the schemata. DREAMIT:S
avoids the need to clamp on the input units by instead using a
decay function so that each unit loses only a portion of its acti-
vation in each cycle, exclusive of any activation it receives from
other associated units in the network (see the Appendix and
Figure 4). Units that represent sensory information decay rap-
idly (40% per cycle). Units that represent contextual informa-
tion decay slowly (20% per cycle), and of the remaining units,
the majority decay at an intermediate rate (30% per cycle).
DREAMITrSl is a single-layered network of 90 cognitive
units designed to simulate several one- and two-step sequences
that might be engaged in by a male college student. The major-
ity of the units represent features, objects, persons, places, and
abstract concepts such as values and roles. As with SCHE-
MATArRSMH each unit has a weight connecting it to each unit
in the matrix. I assigned the initial set of weights as the esti-
mated conditional probability of unit j being active, given the
activation of unit /. Unlike the Hopfield (1982) model, weights
were generally asymmetric even when associated with nonse-
quential relations. Because the weights sending activation to
unit J, unit k,.. . unit N were assigned independently of one
another, they represented at best only an approximation of the
ideal weights where the activation of unit j is a function of the
joint positive and negative input from all units in the net.
A simulation by DREAMITSl is initiated by activating one
or two related units at 0.9 (90% of their maximum activation),
and observing the shifting patterns of activation as the network
moves through successive cycles. The initial activation spreads
 DREAMING: COGNITIVE AND CORTICAL PROCESSES
across associated units until coherent schematalike patterns of
activation are created, as with SCHEMATA:RSMH. For exam-
ple, when the "physics" unit is primed, the network moves over
three or four iterations to a state in which "I-as-student" "re-
member" to do my physics "homework." The network creates
an integrated set of schemata in that it fills in the context of
being at "college," the attitude that physics is "difficult," the
goal to "do well" and the intention to "try hard." If it runs a few
cycles longer, "I-as-student" will "remember" to "buy" a new
"book" to do the homework for the course. "Physics" and the
"I-as-student" role unit inhibit other incompatible roles and the
persons and events associated with them. Similarly, if the "I-as-
son" role unit is active, then priming "hungry" will activate
"mother," her "cooking" and "smiles," and the "kitchen" and
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kitchen "table." However, priming "hungry" when the "I-as-
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student" role is active will activate the school "cafeteria," "ham-
burgers," and lunch "money."
A successful schema was denned as the activation of at least
0.85 of three or more associated units and no incompatible
units. Simulations starting with 30 alternate input pairs demon-
strated that DREAMITiSl can produce schematalike patterns
of activation without clamping on the input units. Although
DREAMITrSI is able to compute schemata responses that are
one or two steps removed from the input that represents the
external stimulus, like SCHEM ATA:RSMH, it always comes to
a stop at that point. A successful model of imaginal processing,
however, must be able to produce a continuous sequence of
schemata. Because the restriction of symmetric weights is re-
laxed in DREAMIT:S1, there is no reason for the model to
come to a halt provided there is sufficient sequential informa-
tion in its weight matrix. To this end I designed DREAMIT:S2
to represent the sequences in a game of catch.
DREAMIT:S2 differs from DREAMIT:S1 in that it consists
of only 62 units and the type of units includes both sensory and
motor information. To simulate the sensory threshold and mo-
tor inhibition shifts that are characteristic of REM sleep, 7 units
represent low-level visual attributes, such as sizes and colors,
and 7 units represent feedback from motor decision units, such
as "motonl-running," which are represented independently of
the motor decisions such as "I-run." The network includes 5
distracter units (e.g., "rectilinear," "paper," "for-writing-on")
that are irrelevant to the game of catch but useful for evaluating
the model.
Depending on the status of other units in the network, the
activation of the "ball-coming-close" unit tends to activate "I-
run" and "I-catch-ball," and both "I-catch-ball" and "I-pick-up-
ball" activate the "I-throw-ball" motor decision unit, which to-
gether activates the motor feedback unit "m: I-throw-ball,"
which in turn activates the visual (image) unit, "ball-going."
Unlike a schema simulation based on a Hopfield net, the
weights in the sequential simulation are set so that clusters of
units that represent a particular step in a sequence, once fully
active, will then inhibit the units representing the prior step.
Essentially, this progression is similar to any nondistributed,
a -» b -» c, sequence. The distributed model, however, permits
many units in the network to participate in each step of a se-
quence and allows some units even to anticipate and prepare
the context within which other units in the step subsequently
become active. For example, activation of the "I-throw-ball"
111
motor decision unit tends to activate the "m: I-throw-ball" mo-
tor feedback unit as well as the subrole unit representing "other-
ballplayer recipient." But as the pattern approaches comple-
tion, it already begins to activate units that will form the next
schema, and they begin to inhibit the preceding pattern.
For the schema to represent a visual image, some of these
units must also activate the lower level visual modality mod-
ules. Thus activating "mother" tends to activate some of her
facial features such as her "v: smile," and activating "ball" tends
to activate "v: small-white-round."
The simulations with DREAMIT:S2 require that a distinc-
tion be made between perceptual and motor responses that are
closely tied to the initial stimulus input and imaginal responses
that are remotely related to the input. If the perceptual and
motor responses cannot be accurately simulated, then the re-
sponsibility for the failure of the model to produce imaginal
response sequences cannot be clearly identified. Accordingly,
the game of catch was divided into eight functional steps. One-
and two-step sequences were defined as perceptual or motor;
longer sequences were called imaginal. A total of 20 different
two-unit input combinations (e.g., "ball-coming" and "I-as-ball-
player") were used to test the ability of the model to produce
good perceptual-motor schemata through two steps, starting at
each of the eight steps in the game.
When inappropriate units were activated or appropriate
units omitted from a schema, some of the weights were modi-
fied and the perceptual simulation was rerun until an appro-
priate schema response was produced. After each response was
successfully produced, the prior sequences were retested and
the weights readjusted where necessary until the 20 different
input combinations yielded appropriate responses.
The somewhat arbitrary nature of this weight adjustment is a
tacit acknowledgment that the Hopfield (1982) model is not
altogether suitable for modeling perceptual events. The prob-
lem clearly lies in the inability of single-layered networks to
express nonlinear relations among the units. The conditional
probability of unit j becoming active given that unit (' is active is
often dependent on the activation of other units. SCHE-
MATA:RSMH and DREAMIT:S cannot represent such inter-
active relations. For example, in a network in which "white,"
"small," "round," and "for-throwing" activate "ball" and
"white," "small," "rectilinear," and "for-writing-on" activate
"paper," the activation of either "ball" or "paper" activates both
"white" and "small," and these two features then feed activation
back to both "ball" and "paper." This pattern of weights has the
unfortunate consequence that the activation of "ball" in the
play-catch sequence tends to start a do-your-homework se-
quence, or vice versa, and that in turn causes the sequence of
the play-catch schemata to disintegrate. The problem could be
solved by using separate "white" units for "paper" and "ball,"
but this would greatly increase the size of the memory required
and violate the basic distributed quality of the network.
Nevertheless, further evaluation of DREAMIT:S was carried
out with the assumption that as long as representation was dis-
tributed across many units and was able to successfully simulate
short stimulus-response sequences it could provide useful in-
formation about imaginal sequences.
In summary, DREAMIT:S simulations of schematalike se-
quences were successful but only within certain limits. As de-
 112 JOHN ANTROBUS
scribed later, DREAMIT:S1 and DREAMIT:S2 simulated the
NREM decrement in dreaming, and DREAMITS2 simulated
the REM sleep inhibition of sensory input, including feedback
from motor units. Above all, DREAMIT:S2 was able to pro-
duce continuous sequences well beyond the brief perceptual
sequences that it had been specifically taught. In particular, the
play-catch sequences could run from 5 to 10 steps, which
amounted to 2 or 3 throws, before the schematalike patterns
showed the signs of incoherence that are described later. The
simulations demonstrated that a single-layered distributed net-
work can produce a sequence of schematalike patterns, but the
shortcomings of the model argue for its replacement by a mul-
tilayered model, DREAMIT:BP
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This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
Distributed Recurrent Activation Model of Imagery and
Thought: Backpropagation (DREAMITBP)
DREAMITBP is designed to overcome the limitations of
DREAMITlS, but it is restricted to a smaller number of units
and does not presume to represent real-world episodes such as
the student behaviors represented by DREAMITS. It is con-
structed to demonstrate how imaginal sequences may be repre-
sented as the activation, in a closed system, of perceptual or
perceptual-motor sequences previously learned in the waking
state. In particular, it shows that nonlinear models are neces-
sary to represent these sequences.
A layered network such as BP (Rumelhart, Hinton, & Wil-
liams, 1986) can allow the activation of units such as "small"
and "white" to interact with different combinations of the fea-
tures "spherical," "rectilinear," "for-throwing," and "for-writ-
ing-on" to create a unique representation of "ball" and "paper."
This nonlinear representation is accomplished by the interposi-
tion of a single "hidden" layer between an input and output
layer. Each unit of the input layer is connected to each unit in
the hidden layer by a different weight, and each unit in the
hidden layer is connected to each unit in the output layer by
another weight, making a total of two weight matrices (see Fig-
ure 5).
The units in the input layer are binary digits 1 or 0 that com-
bine to form a stimulus pattern such as 0011110011. The acti-
vation from each unit is propagated forward to each unit in the
hidden layer where it is multiplied by the weight connecting the
two units. This operation is repeated for all input units that
connect to a given hidden unit, summed over all inputs, and
repeated in parallel for all hidden units. The sequence is then
repeated between the units of the hidden and output layers to
create the activation value for each unit in the output layer.
The second advantage of a BP model is that it learns its own
weights when given correct feedback in response to its output.
The value of each output unit is compared to the correct or
"teaching" value (see Table 1, column 2), and the "error" or
difference is computed. The error information is propagated
back (Figure 4, dashed lines) to the output layer, where the
weights connecting the hidden layer units to that layer are ad-
justed up or down according to the generalized delta rule (see
Rumelhart, Hinton, & Williams, 1986; Wasserman, 1989,
chap. 3). Next, error information is propagated back to the
hidden layer, and appropriate adjustments are made to the first
weight matrix (see Carpenter, 1989).
After several hundred learning trials on each of the 28 pairs,
the learned weights may be tested by presenting each pattern of
the input set and comparing the output with the desired output,
namely the pattern in the training set. For example, the input
0011110011 (Table 1, row I) is being trained to produce
0.000 0.000 1.000 1.000 0.000 0.000 1.000 1.000 0.000 0.000
but may produce
.006 .009 .968 .957 .067 .059 .859 .868 .067 .051,
so that the corresponding errors are
.006 .009 .032 .043 .067 .059 .141 .132 .067 .051.
Note that the input and teaching values are binary but the out-
put values are continuous. Unless specifically noted, training is
then continued until each input produces a good output re-
sponse, denned here as error < 0.1 for each output unit. Note
that the number of input units equals the number of output
units.
BP is used here to model, in a closed system, the effects of
learned nonlinear contextual relations in temporal sequences.
For this reason, the model is less concerned with how the rela-
tions are learned than that they are learned. Because it assumes
that learning is based on feedback from the environment, that
is, "supervised," BP is the model of choice. BP has many limita-
tions as a general model of learning, but they do not handicap
this particular application. BP models are often captured pre-
maturely by local minima, that is, solutions that are less than
optimal and where the above learning criteria cannot be met.
The recently developed BP/Cauchy algorithm (Wasserman,
1989) promises to solve this problem. In thisstudy such training
trials were simply aborted and rerun, except where specifically
noted.
The primary goal of DREAMIT:BP is to determine whether
perceptual or perceptual-motor sequences that are learned in
an open (waking) state can be generated in a closed (sleep) state.
An additional important result of the simulations that are de-
scribed later is serendipitous. The temporal discontinuities and
improbable combinations, the bizarre relations of dreaming
sleep, are shown to be derivative of contingencies learned in the
waking state. In particular, well-learned sequences and contin-
gencies can be represented by a closed system with minimum
distortion or discontinuity. Imaginal discontinuities and im-
probable combinations of features occur where the sequences
or contingencies have not been well learned in the waking state.
To represent an event sequence in which each digit provides a
context for the meaning of the others, let a 5-digit string repre-
sent the following information: the first digit represents "kit-
chen" (1) or "classroom" (0); the second digit represents "door
opens" (1) or "not open" (0); the third digit represents "a per-
son" (1) or "none" (0); the fourth digit represents "speaks to
you" (1) or "doesn't" (0); and the fifth digit represents "a com-
mand" (1) or "none" (0). The sequence of the classroom door
opening, the teacher entering (01100) and telling one to pay
attention (00111) can be represented by 01100 -» 00111. The
sequence of one's mother coming into the kitchen (11100) and
telling one to wash one's hands (10111) can be represented by
11100 -» Will. DREAMIT:BP shows how such contextually
 DREAMING: COGNITIVE AND CORTICAL PROCESSES
OUTPUT
:..: 'Or - Or...;
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LAYER It
INPUT
INPUT
FROM ^
LOWER -( )-
PERCEPTUAL^-'
MODULE
--O--O-
Figure 5. Illustration of standard backpropagation module.
organized learned-sequence pairs behave when, as in the sleep
state, they are cut off from external input. However, no particu-
lar representations are intended for the digit strings in the fol-
lowing simulations.
As with DREAM1T:S2, the simulation of imaginal processes
must be preceded by a demonstration of perceptual processing,
which in turn must be preceded by the learning of appropriate
weights. The training set for DREAMIT:BP5-L (number of seg-
ments = 5, L = loop, number of units =10, number of hidden
units = 9) consists of 28 input-teaching event pairs arranged in
four sets (see Table 1). The 28 out of 32 possible (2s) pairs are
arranged so that the teaching event of 1 pair equals the input to
the next, thereby forming a single loop. Each event consists of
five segments, and each segment is a 00 or 11 pair. The combina-
tion of the two leftmost segments are unique to each of the four
sets of 7 pairs, and the three rightmost segments change from
one event to the next. In this sense, the left segments provide
stable contexts for the right segments.
Following the assumption that in sleep the absence of sen-
113
TEACHING
LAYER a
-Q——Q- INPUT FROM
ANOTHER
MODULE
ERROR
COMPUTA-
TION: 1
sory input permits the imaginal output to become the new "per-
ceptual" input, the output of DREAM1T:BP at time t becomes
the input at time / + 1. Thus, in the imaginal mode, DREAM-
IT:BP is a recurrent model in which the output of the forward
propagation phase is folded back to the input layer (see Figure
6). This is equivalent to eliminating the output layer by return-
ing the output of the hidden layer directly to the input layer to
create a two-layered model. This input-output layer is similar
to the single-layered schemata model of DREAM1T:S, where
each unit is connected directly to each other by a single weight,
except that each intemnit connection is mediated by two sets of
weights, namely the weights that link unit i to each unit in the
hidden layer and the set of weights that link each hidden unit to
unit j in the original layer. In Figure 6, this arrangement is
input -» hidden units, and hidden -* output = input units.
Similar recurrent models have recently been proposed for learn-
ing serially ordered events (Jordan, 1986; Park, 1989).
Simulations of perceptual and imaginal sequences. Each BP-
learned solution for a specific input-teaching set is unique be-
 114 JOHN ANTROBUS

Table 1
Training Set for DREAMITBP5-L and DREAMIT:BP5-4S

DREAMIT:BP5-L DREAMIT:BP5-4S

Subset Input Teaching Input Teaching

1 1 0011110011 0011001100 001 1 110011 0011001100

2 0011001100 0011001111 001 1001 100 001 1001 1 1 1
3 0011001111 0011110000 0011001111 0011110000
4 0011110000 0011111111 0011110000 001 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
5 0011111111 0011111100 0011111111 0011111100
6 0011111100 0011000000 0011111100 0011000000
7 0011000000 1100000011 0011000000 0011000011
2 8 1100000011 1100001100 1100000011 1100001100
9 1100001100 1100111111 1100001100 1I001II11I
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10 11001 1 1 1 1 1 1100000000 1100111111 1 100000000

This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

11 1100000000 1100110011 1100000000 1100110011

12 11001 10011 1100110000 1100110011 1100110000
13 1100110000 1100111100 11001 10000 11001 1 1 100
14 11001 11 100 minim 1100111100 11001 inn
3 15 i n n urn i i inn 100 llllllllll 1 1 1 1 1 moo
16 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 100 1111110011 m i l l MOO in moon
17 1111110011 1 1 1 1 1 10000 1111110011 1 1 1 1 110000
18 1 1 1 1 1 10000 III100I1I1 1111110000 1 1 1 1001 1 1 1
19 1 1 1 100111 1 11 11001100 1111001111 1111001100
20 I I 11001 100 1111000000 imooiioo 1 1 1 1000000
21 1111000000 000000001 1 1111000000 1111000011

4 22 000000001 1 0000110000 0000000011 0000110000

23 0000110000 0000001111 0000110000 0000001 1 1 1
24 0000001 1 1 1 0000111100 00000011 11 ooooi moo
25 00001 1 1 100 0000001100 0000111100 0000001100
26 0000001100 0000111111 0000001100 0000111111
27 00001 1 1 III 0000000000 0000111111 0000000000
28 0000000000 0011110011 0000000000 0000110011

cause it starts with a different set of randomly distributed
weights. In order to avoid making generalizations from a
unique learned solution, a minimum of three independent solu-
tions were completed for each of the DREAM 1T:BP models
described here.
DREAM1T-KP-5-L. There is no evidence that human imagi-
nation becomes progressively more chaotic in a closed state
such as sleep or sensory deprivation. A major failure of
DREAMIT:S was its tendency to become chaotic in runs of
more than 10 steps. Therefore, the first test of DREAMIT:BP-5-
L was that it run indefinitely without showing signs of either
progressive disorganization or chaos. DREAMIT:BP-5-L was
designed to produce a continuous 28-step loop in the imaginal
mode, that is, with no external input other than an initial
stimulus.
Note that although the "imaginal" test with the continuous
loop did not begin until DREAMIT:BP-5-L could produce
good output in response to each of the 28 input items, the input
for each imaginal step was the noisy output of the previous
response (see Figure 6), not the clean binary code of the percep-
tual tests. If this noise was passed along to the output at each
step, the cumulative effect would be either chaos or random
output.
In the imaginal mode, where the output is folded back to the
input, DREAMIT:BP-5-L produced a continuous sequence of
output indefinitely. Most of the output events in a 28-step se-
quence were good (0.000-0.100 or 0.900-1.000) in that they
closely approximated members of the training set and they oc-
curred in the order prescribed in the training set. Between 1 and
3 (mean = 1.4) of the 28 possible imaginal steps, however, were
"soft" in that 1 or more of the units fell in the 0.101-0.300 or
0.700-0.899 range. Some of these soft spots were followed by
one or two degraded or noisy responses (some units in the
0.301-0.699 range). Without exception, however, all of these
were followed by recovery with good output.
On successive imaginal simulations, the soft spots tended to
recur at the same points in the loop, which were invariably at
transitions from one higher order context to the next. The per-
ceptual tests of these steps suggested that the soft spots in the
imaginal sequences were caused by inferior learning of the
transition steps between the four subsets. The probability of a
change in the leftmost segment was 0.14 (4 out of 28 sequences
in the training set), compared with 0.41 for the next two seg-
ments and 0.82 for the rightmost segment.
To test this learning interpretation, the proportion of transi-
tion sequence pairs between subsets in the training set was in-
creased to 0.25 by repeating each transition three additional
times in succession. The soft spots completely disappeared.
These points of sequence disruption, followed by resumption
at a new point, unexpectedly simulated several characteristics
of the bizarre temporal discontinuities that characterize hu-
man thought and imagery in REM or WakingMc. The simula-
tion suggests the hypothesis that discontinuities are likely to
occur at the ends of sequences that have been well learned in
 DREAMING: COGNITIVE AND CORTICAL PROCESSES 115

OUTPUT a
INPUT TO
NEXT
PROCESSING
MODULE

LAYER 2:
HIDDEN

LAYER 1:
a. INPUT
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This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

b. BUFFER
Equivalent to the
Layer 3 of Figure 4

luccetitv* output
LEyEL
of tlM buffer
PERCEPTUAL
MODULE

Figured. Illustration of the forward-propagation portion of DREAMIT:BP, a backpropagation module for

generating either perceptual or imaginal temporal sequences. (For the sake of simplicity, the back-
propagation of errors is not shown.)

the waking state, or conversely, that continuity is sustained
where the components of the sequence have been well learned
in the waking state.
DREAMITBP-5-4S To further test this simulation,
DREAMIT:BP-5-4S (4S = four subsets) was trained on 28 in-
put-training pairs arranged so that the last teaching event in
each subset was not the input event for the next pair (Table 1). In
the imaginal mode, when primed with 0011110011, it propa-
gated forward to a close approximation of the first training
response and then continued through the next six response
events to a close approximation of 0011000011, the end of the
first set. It then produced two or three "soft" responses and
some output that was noisy. But rather than degrading further,
the model recovered within one to three cycles (mean = 2.6) to
produce a "good" response from among the 28 possible re-
sponses in the teaching set. Indeed, most of the responses were
from the teaching events of the same subset. Similar behavior
occurred when DREAMIT:BP-5-4S was primed with any event
from the other three subsets.
Bizarreness in DREAMIT:BP-5: Discontinuities in sequence.
The performance of DREAMIT:BP-5-4S confirms the seren-
dipitous simulation by DREAM1TBP-L of several characteris-
tics of the discontinuities that occur in REM and WakingMC
imagery and thought. Discontinuities occur when the learned
constraints that control the production of the next item in a
sequence are insufficiently strong. Second, the DREAMIT:BP-
5-4S simulations suggest how prior learning can determine the
processes of recovery from a terminated sequence. In particu-
lar, they suggest that contextual features and other well-learned
components of the prior sequence strongly influence the point
of discontinuity at which the sequence will resume. Finally, the
process by which DREAMITBP recovers from degraded out-
put suggests useful hypotheses about the fundamental basis of
imagery and thought production.
The DREAMIT:BP simulations support the hypotheses that
the continuity of an imaginal sequence is a function of the
strength of the prior learning of sequential constraints and that
the onset of a discontinuity is a consequence of too little con-
straint. The DREAMITBP-5-4S simulations showed that the
transition from sequence continuity to degraded output always
occurs at the point where, in the learning history of the model,
the sequence segment terminates. The DREAM 1T:BP-L simula-
tions showed that the same effect tended to occur within a
learned sequence at any point where the step to the next point
was poorly learned. This empirically testable hypothesis is
unique in that it is suggested by a model of how sequences are
learned and then played out in a closed system, rather than by
assumptions about unique cognitive processes during REM
sleep.
Not only do the sequential productions of DREAMIT:BP
resume, but they tend to recover and resume at a contextually
appropriate point in the teaching sequence. This serendipitous
 116 JOHN ANTROBUS
result has not been studied in the laboratory, but it is a relation-
ship that can be researched. It says that when there is a disconti-
nuity in the imaginal sequence, the sequence will resume at a
point that is related to the prior sequence rather than at any
random point. For example, DREAMIT:BP-5-L learned the se-
quences 0011111111 -»• 0011111100 and 0011111100 -»•
0011000000 (Table 1, rows 5-6). At one point in the imaginal
simulation it produced the noisy output .05, .07, .92, .95, .60,
.56, .74, .69, .93, and .95. Despite the noisy third and fourth
segments, the greater similarity of the remaining good seg-
ments to the input values of Step 5 than of Step 6 leads to an
output that is much closer to the output of Step 5,0011111100,
than to the output of Step 6,0011000000. This is a straightfor-
ward example of stimulus generalization. A soft input event
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elicits a response that is appropriate to the most similar stimu-
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
lus of the learning set. Note the distinction: It does not produce
a best approximation to the input value of 5; rather its output
pattern is the appropriate response or sequel to the stimulus
pattern that its previous output most closely resembles.
Even the most degraded responses possessed some good seg-
ments, and these segments constrained the alternatives for the
subsequent response. In this sense, each segment of DREAM-
IT:BP-5-L behaved as a context for the others. This context ef-
fect was tested by degrading one of the three rightmost digit
pairs. Degrading was accomplished by substituting 01 o r l O f o r
11 or 00 in an input item (note that the simulator will not accept
0.5 or 0.5). As with the earlier simulations that started with one
or two spontaneously degraded inputs, it took one to three cy-
cles for DREAMIT:BP-5-L to produce a good output, and the
point of resumption of the sequence represented a temporal
discontinuity. In 20 such tests, all responses were members of
the same subset, that is, the first segment pairs were un-
changed.
Furthermore, the influence of the good segments seemed to
be nonlinear; that is, output produced in response to input with
a missing or degraded segment was based on the interactive or
nonlinear relations among the segments rather than the linear
sum of their effects. Thus the missing parts of the stimulus may
be,- in effect, "filled in" or "figured out." Suppose, for example,
that all of the sequences in Table 1 were equally well learned
and that DREAMIT:BP-5-L produced a degraded version of
0011000011, a response that does not occur in the input list. It
will produce as output the correct response to one of the three
stimuli (see Table 1) to which it is most similar, namely the
inputs of Table 1, row 1, 00111100II; row 3, 0011001111; or
row 7, 0011000000.
If a stimulus generalization, nonlinear response process such
as this operates in the production of sleep imagery it could
account for how the conceptual context of "kitchen" can pro-
duce the image of a "cup of coffee," and the visual image of a
"cup" can elicit the experience of "kitchen." Thus a degraded
image of "small" and "white" in the context of playing catch
should produce a "baseball" but might produce a scrap of
"paper" on the floor in a "classroom" context. By contrast, the
linear functions of DREAMIT:S sometimes produced the bi-
zarre combination of both simultaneously.
As stated earlier, the inhibition of appropriate kinaesthetic
feedback from motor commands has been proposed as a spe-
cific antecedent to bizarreness. The consequence of this
blocked or impaired feedback can be represented in DREAM-
IT:BP by observing the effect of degrading one segment in the
input. The simulation, described earlier in this section, shows
that inhibited kinaesthetic feedback can produce temporal dis-
continuities.
Bizarreness in DREAMIT:BP: Improbable combinations.
Two potential classes of improbable combinations of
DREAMIT:BP output can be defined: improbable within-seg-
ment and between-segment combinations. Improbable combi-
nations of unit pairs (segments) never occurred in any imaginal
simulation. Typically the output values for unit pairs were
within 0.05 of each other. To the extent that these digit pairs
represent the internal consistency of features that are invariant
in the learning environment, this is equivalent to saying that
bizarre combinations never occur among features that are per-
ceptually invariant. For example, faces are never imaged with
their noses inverted.
Unlike the within-segment combinations, between-segment
combinations were highly varied. However, not one novel com-
bination of the five segments was observed in all the DREAM-
IT:BP-5 imaginal simulations just mentioned. The lack of novel
between-segment combinations was due, in part, to the fact
that 28 of the 32 possible segment combinations (0.875) were
used as responses in the training set, so that if the segments
were combined at random, the probability of a novel combina-
tion was only 0.125.
In the real world, however, only an infinitesimal proportion
of all possible feature combinations occur as perceptual events.
If the probability of novel or "improbable combinations" in the
imaginal mode isa negative function ofthe proportion of possi-
ble combinations in the training sets, then DREAMIT:BP simu-
lations have artificially suppressed the opportunity for novel
segment combinations to occur.
DREAMITBP5-4S-.25 (5 segments) and DREAMIT:BP6-
4S-.25 (6 segments, 11 hidden units) were designed to use only
0.25 of their possible 32 and 64 output combinations, respec-
tively. In all but one of the three BP training phases with each
model, it was not possible to satisfy the minimum learning
criterion on one ofthe perceptual test sequences. In the subse-
quent steps of the imaginal phase (omitting the soft steps) the
chance probability of a novel event was 0.81 for DREAM-
IT:BP5 and 0.78 for DREAMIT:BP6. Disregarding the steps in
each sequence that were not adequately learned, DREAM-
IT:BP5-4S-.025 and DREAMIT:BP6-4S-.25 produced no novel
combinations until they reached the last sequence in the learn-
ing set. At that point they tended to produce two or three out-
puts in which one or two ofthe segments were degraded, but
then went on to recover with good output within the next few
cycles. Slightly more than 50% of these recoveries included one
novel output event, that is, an improbable combination, which
typically differed by only one segment from a previously
learned output event. For example, after rounding and collaps-
ing over the unit pairs of each segment, DREAMIT:BP6-4S-.25
produced an approximation to the novel 111011, where the
most similar output in the training set was 111010. Thus,
DREAMIT:BP can simulate the imaginal production of im-
probable combinations, but these novel events are always the
best possible responses within the constraint of prior learning.
This section has shown that simulations of the imaginal
 DREAMING: COGNITIVE AND CORTICAL PROCESSES
mode of various DREAMITBP models have satisfied the goal
of producing continuous sequences of imaginal events, where
each event is a nonlinear function of the preceding event in the
sequence. It has also produced sequence discontinuity and
novel combinations among response segments that simulate the
discontinuities and improbable combinations of REM sleep
and waking imagery and thought.
Repetitive mentation as looping in DREAMITBP5-4S-.25 and
DREAMITBP6-4S-.25. Every simulation run with DREAM-
IT:BP5-4S-.25 and DREAMIT:BP6-4S-.25 produced a loop of
event sequences even though they were not trained to do so. A
loop was often initiated when an imaginal sequence ran to the
end of a previously learned sequence subset. Whether the out-
put at the end of the subset looped back to the beginning of the
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subset or to some subsequent point depended on the similarity
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of the last output to the various input events in the training set
as described earlier. The high rate of looping in the DREAM-
IT:BP5-4S-.25 and DREAMIT:BP6-4S-.25 models may be a
consequence of the small proportion of possible output events
represented in the training set (i£., 0.25), or these models may
be inappropriate to model imaginal sequences. On the other
hand, sleep mentation sampling procedures, which require the
termination of the image sequence in order to get a verbal re-
port, may obscure the extent to which looping is actually char-
acteristic of sleep mentation.
Repetitive thought in humans is regarded as pathological or
controlled by states of extreme motivation. Nevertheless, the
repetitive looping in the waking state of subvocal music phases
is a familiar experience for many persons. Although this char-
acteristic of sleep mentation has not been studied systemati-
cally, Rechtschaffen, Vogel, and Shaikun (1963) did describe
one subject who reported dreaming about her examinations
over a 6-hr period encompassing two REM and NREM re-
ports.
The effect of slate shifts in activation on imagery and thought in
DREAMITS and DREAMIT.BP. Now that local activation
characterized by REM and waking processes has been simu-
lated, one may reexamine the state shifts in nonlocal, molar, or
distributed activation that were reviewed at the beginning of
this article. It is assumed that the distributed activation of the
association cortex is high in waking and in Stage 1 REM sleep
but much lower in NREM sleep. Just as high distributed activa-
tion is defined by active cognitive and behavioral output, so too
the simulation of an activated state should be defined by the
output of well-organized schemata. By this criterion all of the
simulations described thus far have been carried out by fully
activated networks. The problem, then, is to simulate how the
pontine brain stem-to-thalamus control centers reduce their
diffuse cholinergic support of cortical activation during
NREM sleep.
This shift in molar activation is simulated in DREAMIT:S by
assigning a state-specific constant activation value, A, to a con-
trol unit, PRF-THM, that represents the pontine reticular for-
mation-thalamus activation center, where A = I for waking and
REM sleep and 0.7 for NREM sleep. PRF-THM then assigns A
to all excitatory control subunits (see Figure 4 and Appendix;
"Sigma Pi units" in Rumelhart, Hinton, & McClelland, 1986,
pp. 73-74), which in turn multiply all excitatory input to each
local unit by A. The local excitatory units act on the output
117
units much as thalamic neurons control the activation of corti-
cal neurons. With A < 0.7, excitation from other units in the
matrix cannot overcome the decay rate of the local units and
DREAMIT:S fails to activate sufficient units to represent a
schema of any sort. With A = 0.9, DREAMITrS can simulate
the intermediate level of distributed activation that is charac-
teristic of late morning NREM sleep. Compared to A = 1, the
number of items present in schemata are reduced, and the tem-
poral progression is slower and more stereotyped. Because of
the previously described problems encountered with DREAM-
ITS, however, extensive tests with intermediate values of A
were not pursued.
A similar diffuse activation function can be applied to the
hidden and output units of DREAMIT:BP5 (Figure 5, layers 1
and 2), although that simulation has not been carried out.
The simulation of motivation, meaning, and metaphor is
beyond the scope of this article but not beyond the reach of the
DREAMIT models. The linear influences of goal states and
motivation can be represented in DREAMITrS by assigning
positive activation resting-level bias values to particular local
units in a network. Plans have been represented in backpropa-
gation models by Jordan (1989). These plans, goals, or motive
states are represented independently of external input, and they
provide input to a portion of the input layer. The external input
can thus be taught to respond differently to the external input
as a function of different plan states.
As I suggested in earlier papers (Antrobus, 1977,1978), to the
extent that dream events appear to represent combinations of
features of events in one's waking life, they are metaphoric repre-
sentations of waking experience. Thus, the imaginal sequence
of 11101 -» 11110 -» 1 111 1, where the digits represent features
or microfeatures, may symbolize a metaphoric representation
of the waking sequence 11001 -» 11010 -» 11011. It is a meta-
phor because the events in the sequence differ from the waking
sequence only by one (the middle) feature. For example, a logger
and trainman awaiting surgery for vascular obstructions both
dreamed about unclogging objects in their more occupational
environments of pipes and rail switches, respectively. Neither
dreamed about the vascular obstructions, which were to them
much less familiar (Breger, Hunter, & Lane, 1971). In each
REM fantasy, the feature to unclog, which had been activated by
the waking anticipation of vascular surgery, apparently acti-
vated features that had stronger learned links to unclog in the
occupational environments of the two workers.
Dream reports such as these imply that action biases created
in recent waking state episodes may persist into the sleep state,
but for reasons not understood, the units that represent these
goals may be unable to activate the object units of recent waking
perception, particularly the visual units, to which they were
attached during the waking episode. The goal units may well
activate some of the features of the objects in the waking epi-
sode, but not enough to fully activate a visual representation of
that object.
Conclusion
This article was premised on the assumption that the study of
the neurocognition of thought and imagery within the sleep
state can benefit from mapping knowledge of sensory and cog-
 118 JOHN ANTROBUS
nitive psychology, sleep neurophysiology, and sleep mentation
research onto connectionist models. A review of the sleep litera-
ture showed that the salient characteristics of dreaming imag-
ery and thought can be attributed to the periodic activation
during sleep of cortical structures that support waking percep-
tual, conceptual, and motor processes. Under the very high
sensory and motor inhibition of Stage 1 REM sleep, this por-
tion of the mind/brain runs as a closed system, where its input
is its own output. The activation of REM sleep is further en-
hanced during the rising phase of the diurnal rhythm so that
late morning dreaming is particularly dramatic. The subcorti-
cal sources of excitation and inhibition are both attenuated in
the NREM portion of sleep so that imagery is impoverished
and the recognition of external stimuli is restricted.
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DREAMIT:S, a modified version of the schemata model of
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Rumelhart, Smolensky, McClelland, and Hinton (1986) simu-
lated brief sequences of schematalike images and thoughts and
reduced its output as a consequence of reduced activation from
simulated RF and thalamic control sites. It also modified its
schemata as a consequence of inhibited afferent feedback from
the motor commands of prior schemata.
DREAMIT:BP simulations accept their own output as input
and are able to produce continuous sequences that include two
classes of bizarre mentation, improbable combinations of fea-
tures and discontinuities in sequence.
The simulations establish that the neural and cognitive con-
cepts of distributed activation and inhibition can be repre-
sented successfully in connectionist models. They have pro-
vided new insights into cognitive processes, such as dreaming
and even waking imagination, that run for extended intervals
without sensory input. In several instances these insights have
suggested new testable hypotheses. It is hoped that the enforced
discipline of translating the abstract concepts of dreaming sleep
into connectionist models and the theoretical issues raised by
the model building and simulations will enhance the clarity of
future research on dreaming sleep.
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Appendix
Some Technical Characteristics of DREAMIT:S
DREAM1T:S is a single-layered network of compound units (see Fig-
ure 4) connected to one another by asymmetric weights, M^ . Units can
take continuous values between I, representing full activation (a) and 0,
representing maximum inhibition. Each yth unit receives activation or
inhibition from the output of each /th unit in the network. The sum of
the incoming activation and inhibition is algebraically summed and
then squashed by a sigmoid function.
The output resting value of a unit is typically 0.5, representing no
activation. However, motivational or high frequency biases may be
assigned to selected units by setting their resting values above 0.5. To
bias DREAMIT:S to respond to temporal change, a unit is reset to a
negative resting value, generally 0.4, for a fixed number of cycles pre-
determined by the operator, if the activation of the unit exceeds a
threshold, generally set at 0.95, for three cycles.
Continuity within shorter time intervals is provided by adecay func-
tion. Decay of a unit over time is simulated by passing a proportion of
the output value of each unit back to its input. Units decay to their
resting values, unless supplied with new input. Slower decay, and there-
fore greater continuity, is assigned to contextual and role units; rapid
decay is assigned to perceptual qualities. The former are assigned slow
decay rates, usually returning 0.8 of their value per cycle, and the lat-
ter, 0.6.
Crick and Asanuma (1986) have pointed out that individual cortical
units carry either activation or inhibition but not both. By giving local
units both excitatory and inhibitory influence, however, DREAMIT:S
is constructed from one third the number of units and one ninth the
weight matrix required for separate representation of excitatory and
inhibitory neurons, with no loss of function.
Distributed influence from subcortical control centers to cortical
units is primarily excitatory, and is exclusively so in DREAMIT:S, but
in REM sleep the distributed subcortical influence on afferent and on
motor efferent activity is inhibitory. Because summation and product
computation cannot both be carried out within a single site, using the
RochesterConnectionist Simulator, the positive and negative inputs to
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each output subunit are summed independently, and algebraically in
the excitatory and inhibitory input subunits. Therefore, the effects of
distributed activation and inhibition on local units is accomplished by
apportioning the functions of each unit among five subunits: (a) excit-
atory input, (b) inhibitory input, (c) inhibitory output, (d) distributed
excitation, and (e) distributed inhibition (see Figure 4). The activation
constant, A, for a particular biological state (waking = REM = I ;
NREM = 0.7) is assigned by the operator to a pontine reticular forma-
tion-to-thalamus excitatory control subunit (PRF-THM-E), which dis-
tributes A to all local distributed excitation subunils. Output from each
excitatory input subunit is passed to a Sigma Pi (Rumelhart, Hinton, &
McClelland, 1986) input site of the output subunit, where it is multi-
plied by A and the product forwarded to the body of the output subunit
where it is summed with the input from the inhibitory subunil,
squashed, and then passed to the output of the output subunit. From
there it is distributed to all the units in the network, including the
decay link to itself, to which it is connected by the weight matrix.
The REM sleep inhibition of local afferent and efferent transmission
is accomplished by asimilar inhibitory process controlled by the inhibi-
tory control unit (PRF-THM-I), the value /of which is set at 1 during
REM sleep simulations and 0 for the waking perceptual simulations. In
DREAMIT:S, this distributed inhibition of noncortical afferents is
restricted only to 11 units, 5 of which are "sensory-perceptual" and 6 of
which are "kinaesthetic" feedback (K) units.
All weights, and decay, control, and unit resting values are fixed
throughout a given simulation, but activation can be delivered to any
set of individual units during the course of a simulation so that the
network can be observed with different initial primes. While the level
of distributed excitation is fixed throughout a simulation and applies
to all units in the network, distributed inhibition can be applied phasi-
cally within a simulation. The remaining input to these units is excit-
atory. Local cortical, motor decision units may activate local K feed-
back units, but this feedback is inhibited if PRF-THM is in the REM
state.
 DREAMING: COGNITIVE AND CORTICAL PROCESSES 121

Furthermore, if "I-run" and associated cortical units activate the
"K: I-am-running" unit, then if, and only if, the "I-run" units remain
active but the "K: I-am-running" unit fails to become active, other
portions of the network will generate a dreamer's common response,
"I-can't-run" and "I-can't-move."
Although the visual, conceptual, motor, and motor feedback units
belong to functionally and neurally distinct processing modules, this
modular organization in DREAMITrS is represented in a single weight
matrix. Units that belong to the same module are interconnected by
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
weights whose mean absolute value is much higher than that of the
weights connecting units in different modules.
Simulations were carried out on a Sun 3/60 Workstation using the
Rochester Connectionist Simulator, Version 4.
Received January 26,1989
Revision received March 26,1990
Accepted April 3,1990 I

Butcher, Geen, Hulse, and Salthouse Appointed

New Editors, 1992-1997

The Publications and Communications Board of the American Psychological Association

announces the appointments of James N. Butcher, University of Minnesota; Russell G. Geen,
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Georgia Institute of Technology as editors of Psychological Assessment: A Journal ofConsulting
and Clinical Psychology, the Personality Processes and Individual Differences section of the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal
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Manuscript submission patterns make the precise date of completion of 1991 volumes uncer-
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