South African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist Mark Solms published a series of landmark neuroimaging studies that founded the field of neuro-psychoanalysis. Solms demonstrated that dreaming is driven by the brain's dopamine-mediated seeking system, located deep within the ventromesial frontal cortex, rather than just random brainstem firings. This effectively bridged Freudian dream theory with hard modern neurology, proving that dreams are indeed highly structured, goal-directed psychological expressions of deep human desire.

Solms's resolution of the decades-long scientific debate over dreams revitalized the use of psychoanalytic theory in literary criticism. It gave contemporary conceptual and speculative poets a firm biological mandate to treat the dream state as a highly structured, evolutionary engine of human survival and creative desire.