People Still Place Meaning on Dreams

"The Dream," by Henri Rousseau, 1910.

Here are excerpts from a group of psychological studies concerning dreams, as documented recently in this month's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association:

• Researchers in the United States, India and South Korea asked 149 students to rate different theories about dreams. Across all three cultures, an overwhelming majority of the students endorsed the theory that dreams reveal hidden truths about themselves and the world, a belief also endorsed by a nationally representative sample of Americans.

• In another study, researchers surveyed 182 commuters at a Boston train station, asking them to imagine that one of four possible scenarios had happened the night before a scheduled airline trip: The national threat level was raised to orange; they consciously thought about their plane crashing; they dreamed about a plane crash; or a real plane crash occurred on the route they planned to take. A dream of a plane crash was more likely to affect travel plans, and the dream of a plane crash produced a similar level of anxiety as did an actual crash.

• Researchers asked 270 men and women from across the United States to remember a dream they had had about a person they knew. People ascribed more importance to pleasant dreams about a person they liked as compared to a person they did not like, while they were more likely to consider an unpleasant dream more meaningful if it was about a person they disliked.

And yet another study demonstrated that people who believe in God were likely to consider dreams where God spoke to them to be meaningful. Agnostics considered dreams in which God spoke to be more meaningful when God commanded them to take a pleasant vacation than when God commanded them to engage in self-sacrifice.

Click here for the Science Daily article.