Situated Cognition in Dreams

Situated Cognition in Dreams
While the above argument points towards the similarity between thoughts while dreaming and in waking life, clearly there is a difference in how the two states are experienced and the type of cognition occurring in each. As discussed earlier, for the majority of time spent dreaming, we accept as real even the most bizarre scenarios, and are able to make rationalizations allowing us to treat the dream as real. Generally speaking, we are fooled into accepting a dream experience as a real experience, until we awake and reflect on the content of the dream. This indicates a general deficit in certain aspects of executive functioning (e.g., deficits in planning, monitoring, attention switching, etc.), including skills relating to critical-thinking and our ability to access specific types of memories.
While dreaming, an effect of the general deficit in executive functioning is that our cognitive machinery becomes fully engrossed in perceptions and goal-states directly relevant to perceptions of the dream. This has a considerable resemblance to the idea of situated cognition, in which cognition is tied to the moment and restricted to satisfying goals pertaining to current concerns (also, perceptual narrowing has been shown in alternate contexts within the rubric of the threat-rigidity effect, proposed by Staw, Sandelands, and Dutton, 1981). It can be argued that all non-human cognition is situated, and that it is the ability to extend thinking beyond the here-and-now of perception and motivation that makes human cognition unique (Bogdan, 1997). It has even been hypothesized that what humans currently experience during REM sleep shares a similarity to waking consciousness in early hominid brain evolution (Panksepp, 1998). Jaynes (1976) takes this idea even further by arguing that there was a time, roughly 3000 years ago, when humans lacked consciousness and acted in a way that parallels the situated nature of dream consciousness.
This situated aspect of dreaming also makes sense from an evolutionary perspective and further supports aspects of the threat-simulation theory. While it is advantageous to rehearse situations that are subjectively deemed as threatening, it is equally disadvantageous to come across a threatening scenario in real life and invest the time required to wonder whether or not that situation is real. Therefore, in order for this dream mechanism to be selected for, an important aspect of its initial selection is that the perceived threats encountered during a dream must be experienced as a real. This means that certain higher-order mental processes, which would function to appraise the situation in an intellectual fashion (mostly frontal areas), would likely have to be deactivated, which research indicates is the case (Mazur, Pace-Schott, Hobson, 2002).
In most dreams there are deficits in the ability to solve complex problems. Evidence from fMRI studies during REM sleep, show that there is a decrease in activity of the prefrontal cortex, which would normally be associated with a decrease in executive functioning (Mazur et al., 2002). Specifically, it has been found that there is a decrease in activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during REM sleep. This cortical region of the brain is crucial for tasks that require us to switch from our current line of thinking and inhibit a task once initiated. The deactivation of this region during a dream-state makes intuitive sense, in that for most dreams even very bizarre scenarios are normally accepted without question and we generally just go with the flow of the dream. We can visit with people who have passed away or interact with those whom we have not seen in years and yet this normally does not stop the dream from continuing or cause us to come to the conclusion that we are dreaming.