After completing a short form of the Boundary Questionnaire (Appendix A), 17 students with high scores indicative of thin boundaries and 13 students with low scores indicative of thick boundaries participated in a testing session in which they reported their "most recent dream'~ their "most recent daydream ", another "dream that really stands out'~ and another "daydream that really stands out." Dreams and daydreams were rated on three 8-point scales-Bizarreness, Dreamlikeness, and Emotionality-by two independent raters who remained blind to Boundary Questionnaire scores. The dream reports were rated significantly more bizarre, more dreamlike, and more emotional than the daydream reports. In addition, the thin boundaried subjects' reports were significantly more bizarre than the thick boundaried subjects' reports. Indeed, the recent daydreams of subjects with thin boundaries were as bizarre as the recent dreams of those with thick boundaries.

A contextualizing image (Cl) is a powerful central image of a dream which appears to "contextualize" (provide a picture-context for) the dreamer's emotion. For instance, dreamers who have experienced any serious traumatic event sometimes dream, "I was overwhelmed by a tidal wave." This appears to picture their feeling of terror and/or vulnerability.A scoring system for CIs is examined here and is applied to dreams and daydreams supplied by 40 students. Two raters scoring dreams on a blind basis showed good inter-rater reliability. Recent dreams were shown to have more as well as more intense CIs than recent daydreams; likewise, dreams "that stand out" had more intense CIs than daydreams that "stand out." Students with "thin boundaries" had more and more intense CIs than students with "thick boundaries" in their recent dreams and nightmare, but not so clearly in dreams and nightmares "that stand out." The emotions judged as contextualized by the powerful images tended towards fear/terror and helplessness/vulnerability in dreams (especially in dreams that stand out) whereas emotions contextualized by images in daydreams showed a wide range with no clusters.

One hundred seventy-seven college students completed personality measures including the MMPI-168, and reality-discrimination measures including a timed discrimination task developed by the first author. Previously on such a timed task, normal subjects discriminated percepts more quickly from images of perceptual vividness than from faint images, as if they registered more “central innervation” during more vivid imaging. Presently, on each of the four practice trials and forty-four timed trials in Task 1, subjects fixated on a dot, perceived a stimulus to one side, imaged an identical stimulus on the other side and rated its vividness while continuing to image. Then, either the dot became a P and subjects pressed a button on the side of the percept, as quickly as possible, or the dot became an I and subjects pressed a button on the side of the image. The slope, within subject, of image/percept discrimination times over image-vividness ratings was computed for the 149 subjects who rated some of their forty-four images more vividly than others. It was predicted and found that self-described hallucinators and MMPI-defined paranoids discriminated percepts less quickly from vivid images, as if the greater “central innervation” behind more vivid images is not registered by psychosis-prone subjects.

Following a review of introspectionist, dualist, and functionalist theories of self-consciousness, a mind-brain monitoring theory is developed. According to monitoring theory, self-consciousness is one's tacit knowledge that one is experiencing sensations: in particular, that one is imaging sensations or that one is perceiving them. Such knowledge is the phenomenal consequence of neurally monitoring whether one's sensations are centrally innervated images or peripherally innervated percepts. As a corollary of the present theory, dream images are interpreted as unmonitored images. Other hallucinations, which also arise in the absence of self-consciousness, are similarly interpreted. As another corollary, “subconscious” percepts are interpreted as unmonitored percepts. Experimental and clinical evidence in support of these and other corollaries is reviewed.

The CI (Central Image or Contextualizing Image) can be considered the emotional center of the dream. The CI can sometimes be seen as picturing the emotion behind the dream—as in the paradigmatic “Tidal Wave Dream.” The CI is the best-remembered part of the dream. CI Intensity, rated on a reliable scale, is higher after trauma, after 9/11/01, and in dreams considered “important” by the dreamer. In this study we examined CI Intensity, as well as “dream-likeness” and “bizarreness,” of recent dreams, dreams that stand out, and earliest dreams in 40 students, 20 who scored very “thick” and 20 who scored very “thin” on the short form of the Boundary Questionnaire. Results showed, first of all, that for the group as a whole, CI Intensity was rated higher in dreams that stand out, and in earliest dreams, than in recent dreams. “Thin” students had higher CI Intensity than “thick” students in recent dreams and dreams that stand out, but not in earliest dreams. In “dreams that stand out,” there was a significant positive correlation between CI Intensity and how long ago the dream had occurred. The same was true for bizarreness but not for dreamlikeness. There was a significant interaction between thick versus thin boundaries and earliest versus recent dreams: in the earliest dreams (generally reported as occurring at age 5–7) thick and thin students had equal CI Intensity, but in recent dreams (experienced usually at age 18–20) there was a great difference between the groups, thin students having a higher CI Intensity. This is consistent with the view that all children may start with fairly thin boundaries, but that some undergo more change (”thickening“) than others between age 6 and 18.