An Attempt at Matching Waking Events Into Dream Reports by Independent Judges
Frontiers in Psychology April 6, 2018 Jia Xi Wang, He Yong Shen 4 citations
Dreaming often reflects waking life events, thoughts, and emotions, and sleep may help consolidate memories. Most research on this link relies on self-reports, where participants judge connections between their own experiences and dreams—a method that can introduce errors when comparing groups due to individual differences. To address this, the authors developed two operationalized definitions—descriptive incorporation and metaphorical incorporation—for independent judges to match conscious experiences with dreams. Two judges linked 212 paired event-dreams. Almost half of the dreams could be matched by independent judges, and this method yielded similar proportions of matches as the self-report method.