The lack of thematic continuity in dreams with scene and plot discontinuities.
Sleep advances : a journal of the Sleep Research Society January 1, 2025 Robert Stickgold, Funke Sangodeyi
A central claim of Freudian dream theory—that dreams have thematic coherence even when scenes or plots shift abruptly—was tested by asking judges to distinguish intact dream reports from ones that had been cut at their discontinuities and spliced with segments from other people's dreams. Judges correctly identified which reports were intact only 57% of the time, barely above chance. Only 3 of 20 reports were reliably scored correctly, and one intact report was mis-scored by 80% of judges. Characters, locations, and objects helped judges, while psychoanalytic content and writing style did not. The authors conclude that apparent coherence in dreams likely arises from the interpreter's mind, not the dreamer's.