Edelman's 'Conceptual Categorisations' Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

 Edelman (1992: 109):

Conceptual categorisations are enormously heterogeneous and general. Concepts involve mixtures of relations concerning the real world, memories, and past behaviour. Unlike the brain areas mediating perceptions, those mediating concepts must be able to operate without immediate input.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, conceptual categorisations constitute, in the first instance, the organisation of ongoing construals of experience ("the real world") as perceptual meaning into systems of perceptual potential.  The operation of the brain areas subserving such concepts constitutes the instantiation of perceptual potential.

Given that memory is the ability to instantiate potential, and that this ability results from a process of continual re-instantiation, it might be hypothesised that one function of some forms of dreaming sleep is to instantiate such systems, and by so doing, help to establish and maintain the ability to instantiate them without immediate input from outside the brain.