The role of dreaming in the assimilation and mastery of new experiences was examined in this study. Previous work had shown that a film of an autopsy can evoke measurable psychologic and physiologic indices of anxiety. Adaptation to the experience was indicated by lower levels of anxiety during a second viewing of the film. We examined the effect of dream (Stage REM) deprivation on adaptation to the second viewing. Between the first and second viewings, 9 subjects were dream deprived, 5 had normal sleep and 6 were awakened from non-REM sleep. For those who showed a significant anxiety response to the first viewing, the dream deprived group showed significantly less adaptation to the second viewing than the other two groups. These results support the hypothesis that dreaming aids adaptation to anxiety-provoking stimuli.The concept that dreaming serves to fulfill wishes, presented by Freud in the Interpretation of Dreams, eclipsed all previous theories about dreaming, but subsequent writers have frequently commented on the limitations of this hypothesis as a total theory of dream function. Maeder(l), Garma (2) and Piaget (3) have proposed that dreaming is involved in adaptation to traumatic (anxiety-arousing) experiences. French and Fromm (4) elaborated this concept into a theory that dreaming is concerned with the formulation of solutions to current "focal conflicts" of the dreamer.Studies based on current psychophysiologic concepts of sleep have also led to the idea that dreaming during stage REM sleep* is involved in processing new experiences. Breger (5) formulated dreaming as a working over and inteFrom the Boston Veterans Administration

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