Recovery of early memories associated with reported dream imagery.

In recent years dreaming has been characterized as an information-processing activity that functions adaptively to match new experience with representations of past events already stored in long-term memory. Nine patients who reported dreams in psychotherapy were asked expressly if the dream imagery recalled a specific event from early in their lives. Of 50 consecutively reported dreams, 46 were associated with early events whose imagery appeared in the dream. When questioning about the past was omitted in a later series of 34 dreams, the same patients spontaneously recalled early events represented in the dream imagery only 13 times.