Touchstone :: Dreams

Dreams themselves may have an important cognitive/emotional function, and REM may simply be a vehicle for bringing this about. For example, they may enable you to try out various hypothetical scenarios that would be potentially destabilizing if rehearsed during wakefulness. In other words, dreams may allow a sort of 'virtual reality' stimulation using various forbidden thoughts that are ordinarily eclipsed by the conscious mind; such thoughts might be brought out tentatively to see whether they can be assimilated into the story line. If they can't be, then they are repressed and once again forgotten.

V.S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain, p. 283