A Biography of G. William Domhoff

(and a summary of his recent work in dream research)

G. William Domhoff, who goes by "Bill," studied dream research with Calvin Hall at the University of Miami, where he received his Ph.D. in psychology in 1962. Before that, he attended Duke University in North Carolina and Kent State University in Ohio (M.A., 1959). He taught at California State University in Los Angeles from 1962 to 1965. He then taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz from Fall Quarter, 1965, through Spring Quarter, 2019. In 1993 he was promoted to Distinguished Professor of Psychology; in 2007 he received the Constantine Panunzio Distinguished Emeriti Award, which honors the post-retirement contributions of UC faculty. In June, 2024, UCSC honored Bill with a one-year Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professorship, which provided financial support for his ongoing research in the 2024-2025 academic year.

He has published numerous articles on dreams in academic journals, some as a co-author with Calvin Hall and others with Adam Schneider.

Dreams, Sleep, and Consciousness (2026)

Bill's most recent book is Dreams, Sleep, and Consciousness: Interweaving the Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming with New Theories of Sleep and Consciousness, published in April 2026, by Routledge. It uses a wide range of empirical studies by leading neuroscientists and research psychologists to explain why we dream, why we sleep, and why we have consciousness. The book makes use of neuroimaging studies (awake and asleep), studies of people with focal lesions in specific areas of the brain, and developmental studies of children to suggest that dreaming is based on the activation of portions of the waking default network, which is the neurocognitive network that supports semantic memory, concept formation, daydreaming, mind-wandering, and much else. This waking default network is controlled by the frontoparietal control network — i.e., the "executive network." Click here for more details and a link to download the first chapter.

The truncated neurocognitive network that enables dreaming is different from the neurocognitive networks that have been found in hallucinatory states, psychosis, recreational drug states, meditative states, and hypnotic states, which means that the many past attempts to compare dreaming to one or more of these states are no longer relevant. Instead, dreaming is based primarily on the truncated version of the waking network that supports imagination and daydreaming. When this truncated network is relatively activated during (1) the sleep-onset process, (2) rapid movement (REM) sleep, and (3) Non-REM 2 sleep in the 1.5-2.5 hours before the morning awakening, people experience themselves as being in the dramatic scenarios called dreams, which almost always include other human beings and/or animals. And those other human beings are usually involved in aggressive, friendly, or sexual interactions with the dreamer in the context of vivid sensory environments, but not always.

The only theory of sleep that explains why dreaming occurs during the sleep-onset process, REM sleep, and Non-REM 2 sleep toward morning is the adaptive inactivity theory of sleep. Moreover, this theory has a highly plausible and scientifically grounded explanation for why all land mammals have varying degrees of REM sleep — REM sleep periodically reheats core regions of the brain. This theory builds on experimental studies of various mammals in sleep labs and lesion studies of mammalian brains. It also relies heavily on comparative studies of the sleep patterns of atypical mammals that sleep as much as 18-20 hours a day (e.g., certain species of bats, opossums), or as little as 1.2 hours per day (African bush elephants), or do not sleep at all (certain species of dolphins and porpoises). According to this theory, the basic adaptive function of sleep is energy conservation. The emphasis on sleep as a form of adaptive inactivity is consistent with the adaptive inactivity experienced by many other form of life, such as trees losing their leaves during winter and reptiles going into a state of dormancy when the temperature drops. The theory is presented in the first chapter of Dreams, Sleep, and Consciousness.

As for consciousness, it is the result of a multistate hierarchical network that importantly relies on the development of prefrontal areas in the human cortex over the past several hundred thousand years of human evolution, along with enlargements in specific regions in the parietal cortex, and greatly increased network ties beyond frontal and parietal areas of the brain. Consciousness is a highly valuable evolutionary adaptation because it personalizes danger and makes near-instantaneous evaluations of every aspect of the environment possible. It thereby increases the chances of survival and reproductive success in a world that has been full of dangers since the first organisms evolved. This theory is also outlined in Chapter 1.

Previous books on dreams

Bill's 2022 book, The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming: The Where, How, When, What, and Why of Dreams, published by MIT Press, focused exclusively on dreaming and dream content. In 2023 it received the American Association of Publishers PROSE Award as a Category Winner in the Biological & Life Sciences section. The book was published with a open-access Creative Commons license and can be downloaded in full from the MIT Press web site. Click here for more details about the book, incuding a methodological appendix that focuses on what's necessary to do studies of dream content that have scientific value.

In addition to Dreams, Sleep, and Consciousness and The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming, Bill has written four other books about dreams. In 2018, he published The Emergence of Dreaming: Mind-Wandering, Embodied Simulation, and the Default Network with Oxford University Press. It takes a more historical approach than his 2026 and 2022 books in that it presents the findings from laboratory studies of dreams in greater detail than they had been in previous books by dream researchers. There's an overview of the book on this web site, along with links to a news story about the book and a video of a lecture related to it.

Bill's 2003 book on dreams was titled The Scientific Study of Dreams: Neural Networks, Cognitive Development, and Content Analysis. It presents an earlier version of his neurocognitive theory, based on neuroimaging findings from the 1990s, before anything was known about the default network with regard to dreaming. It presented a full statement on the then-new DreamBank.net and how it could be used by one and all for research (but not for commercial enterprises). It is also notable for the most detailed quantitative study of a very long dream series that has been carried out. Click here for more information on The Scientific Study of Dreams, including a link to download a PDF of the entire 2003 book; the PDF does not differ in substance from the published version, which is now out of print.

Bill's 1996 book, Finding Meaning in Dreams: A Quantitative Approach, relies heavily on quantitative studies carried out by Calvin Hall between the 1940s and 1970s, and by Adam Schneider in the 1990s. The complete text of Finding Meaning in Dreams is available in the Dream Library on this Web site. The material in the book on cross-cultural findings (Chapter 6) is still, as of 2026, the most comprehensive summary of a very important set of studies of dream content by anthropologists between the 1920s and early 1990s. In fact, the small amount of work on dreaming by anthropologists in the twenty-first century is not nearly as rigorous or useful.

The chapters in Finding Meaning in Dreams on the consistency of dream content over years and decades (Chapter 7) and on the relationship between dreams and personal concerns (Chapter 8) still provide the most complete and detailed summaries of foundational studies of dream content. It's necessary to know about these studies in order to understand just how solid the basis is for the generalizations about dream content in Sleep, Dreams, and Consciousness and in The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming. However, it also should be added that there are also summaries of new findings on consistency in more recent dream series in both Dreams, Sleep, and Consciousness (Chapter 4) and in The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming (Chapter 4 for adult findings, and Chapter 7 for teenagers).

In 1985, Bill wrote The Mystique of Dreams, which debunks the widespread belief that the Semai and Temiar people of highland Malaysia practice dream control and have extraordinary mental health. It shows through anthropological evidence that "Senoi Dream Theory" — as Americans know it through best-selling pop psych dream books — is really American "we-can-do-and-control-anything" ideology. The dream-control myth was projected onto the Semai and Temiar by Kilton Stewart, an American adventurer who happened on them accidently, didn't know the language, and spent only a few weeks with them. An updated critique of Senoi Dream Theory is available in this Web site, as is a frank and blunt article from 1991 that explains the larger purpose of the book and adds new findings on the vagabond from Utah who created "Senoi Dream Theory" out of whole cloth.

For a list of all of Bill's published works about dreams, click here.

Go back