Introduction to the Special Section on Working on dreams, from psychotherapy to neuroscience

Dreams have long been the focus of multidisciplinary research: psychoanalytic, neuroscientific, and clinical psychology. Recent neuropsychological studies (Fis- chmann et al., 2013; Hopkins, 2016; Solms, 2000, 2015) have provided strong evidence for the classic psychoana- lytic concept (Freud, 1900/1953; Jung, 1960a, 1960b) that dreams have both a biological and a psychological func- tion (Hoss & Gongloff, 2019). At the beginning of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud floated the hypothesis of conti- nuity between dreaming and waking life (Freud, 1900/1953). This connection was formalized in the con- tinuity hypothesis, which holds that dream content reflects waking concerns, thoughts, interests and experiences (Domhoff, 1996; Domhoff & Schneider, 2008; Schredl & Hoffman, 2003). It appears that one of the main functions of dreaming is to increase the dreamer’s capacity to process emotion, by elaborating on stressful experiences and psychic conflicts.