Freud Returns? Like a Bad Dream.

The article counteracts some of the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis. For Freud, the bizarre nature of dreams resulted from an elaborate effort of the mind to conceal, by symbolic disguise and censorship, the unacceptable instinctual wishes welling up from the unconscious when the ego relaxes its prohibition of the id in sleep. But most neurobiological evidence supports the alternative view that dream bizarreness stems from normal changes in brain state. Chemical mechanisms in the brain stem, which shift the activation of various regions of the cortex, generate these changes.