In spite of the fact that there is no consensus concerning questions about the nature and origin of dreams, the majority of the studies on the nature of the dreams agrees that they are related to internal conditions of the organism. As opposed to that notion, the radical behaviorism analyses the dreams as private behaviors and, thus, as products of philogenetical, ontogenetical, and cultural histories. In this sense, this paper aims to analyze the dreams from a radical behaviorism perspective, considering them as private events, perceptual behaviors, and arguing that they are learned processes. It is asserted that the dreams interpretation is impossible if the contingencies that control such activity are unknown.
Dream; radical behaviorism; perceptual behavior; conditioning