A Cognitive Theory of Dreams Calvin Hall was a behavioral psychologist, he explored the cognitive dimensions of dreaming. The main idea of the cognitive theory of dream is that images of a dream are the embodiment of thoughts. The audience of a dream consists of only one person, the dreamer himself. A dream is a highly private showing of the dreamer 's thoughts.
Relationship between thinking and dreaming In order to describe this theory, the first thing we need to know about is thinking.
Thinking is a process of conceiving. At the end of this process, a new conception, i.e. an idea, is formed as the end-product. A conception is an item of knowledge, a formulation of experience which has meaning for a person. Conceiving does not require any direct sensory data from external world or from one’s body, it can automatically generate by our brain. In contrast, perceiving I a process which is dependent upon direct stimulation of senses stimulated by the external environment. Dreaming can be defined as thinking that occurs during sleep, and also thinking consists essentially of generating ideas, then dreaming is also a process of conceiving and the images we imagine in our dream may be considered as the embodiment of conceptions. Conceiving is a process that turning some ideas from invisible to visible, the conception, which known as the end-product of this process, is formed when it is transformed into dream image, the images of dream are pictures of conceptions. According