Bottom-up or top-down in dream neuroscience? A top-down critique of two bottom-up studies

Recent neuroscientific studies of dreaming, specifically those in relation to waking sensory–motor impairments, but also more generally, betray a faulty understanding of the sort of process that dreaming is. They adhere to the belief that dreaming is a bottom-up phenomenon, whose form and content is dictated by sensory–motor brain stem activity, rather than a top-down process initiated and controlled by higher-level cognitive systems. But empirical data strongly support the latter alternative, and refute the conceptualization and interpretation of recent studies of dreaming in sensory–motor impairment in particular and of recent dream neuroscience in general.