In his latest contribution to dream research, Hobson published a series of eight papers in the journal Consciousness and Cognition that reported studies examining the dreams of approximately 100 people, including 14 children ages 4 to 10. The studies took three years and involved analyzing more than 1,000 dreams. Although the articles published in Consciousness and Cognition focus specifically on those characteristics, this research has led Hobson to identify the many parallels between the dream state and psychosis. You can't pay attention in dreams. By the time you've noticed the picture, the scene has changed from a museum to your grandmother's house.
Insight is nonexistent-precisely like being crazy.
Hobson also looked at what made dreams bizarre. The bizarre nature of dreams, he continues, is caused by an absence of orientation. If you didn't know any one of those things, you'd be operating without a compass. In dreams, times and places and persons change without notice so the very ground of cognitive experience is being shifted. And more often than not, Hobson found, the emotion is not a pleasant one.