Harvard psychiatrists J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley proposed the radical 'Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis', challenging the classic Freudian psychoanalytic view of dreams. They argued that dreams are simply the conscious mind's desperate attempt to synthesize and make sense of random chemical firings originating in the brainstem during REM sleep. According to this model, dream imagery is not a carefully disguised secret message from a repressed subconscious, but rather a narrative framework built around neurological noise.

This theory deeply impacted late twentieth-century postmodern poetry by validating absolute randomness and narrative discontinuity as natural human states. Poets like John Ashbery and Language school writers began intentionally mimicking this 'activation-synthesis' process, constructing poems out of random linguistic fragments to replicate how the brain builds meaning out of chaos.