Sleeping at sacred outdoor sites in England and Wales was associated with more aggressive dream content and less friendly, failure, striving, and success content compared with sleeping at home. Thirty-five volunteers spent one to five nights at one of four unfamiliar sacred sites and were awakened after rapid eye movement to report dreams; the same volunteers also kept dream diaries at home. Equal numbers of site and home dream reports were obtained from each volunteer. Analysis using the Hall-Van de Castle Scale revealed several differences, but no significant differences in bizarre or paranormal content were found between site and home dreams. The authors propose expectancy, suggestion, unfamiliar surroundings, or possible anomalous properties of the sites as explanations.
Men in England reported dreams with a higher ratio of aggression to friendliness than women did, while women reported more physical aggression and a higher percentage of bodily misfortunes in their dreams. Some findings matched past American studies, but others were unique to this English sample, possibly due to the participants being dream seminar attendees or reflecting cultural patterns.
A new scoring system, the Casto Spirituality Scoring System, can reliably identify spiritual content in dream reports. Two independent judges achieved high inter-rater reliability when scoring 280 dream reports from dream seminars in six countries and from individuals in spiritual development programs. Fifty-nine of the 280 reports contained spiritual content as defined by the system. The results are promising but further research is needed to fully demonstrate the system's usefulness.