Dream socialisation encompasses factors that might affect children's attitudes towards dreams or their dream recall frequencies directly; for example, by being asked about dreams by other persons or the sharing of dreams with others. The present study in 170 children/adolescents (age range 10–15 years) was designed to study whether dream socialisation might help to explain the well-documented...
Nightmares are defined as dreams with strong negative emotions that result in awakening. Overall, the findings of the present representative survey (N = 915) indicate that nightmare frequency decrease with age and living in urban areas are associated with heightened nightmare frequency. Longitudinal studies are needed to clarify how age affects nightmare frequency because the findings of...
The percentages of successful dream recall vary depending on whether the participants were awakened from REM sleep (about 80% recall) or NREM sleep (about 50% recall). The question as to whether this difference is explained by less dreaming during NREM sleep or sleep state-dependent memory processes cannot answered easily. The present pilot study was designed to test whether high recallers can...
In lucid dreams the dreamer is aware of dreaming and often able to influence the ongoing dream content. Lucid dreaming is a learnable skill and a variety of techniques is suggested for lucid dreaming induction. This systematic review evaluated the evidence for the effectiveness of induction techniques. A comprehensive literature search was carried out in biomedical databases and specific...
Mental practice is the cognitive rehearsal of a motor task in the absence of overt physical movement. A different and rather unknown kind of mental rehearsal is practice in lucid dreams. Within lucid dreams, the dreamer is able to control the ongoing dream content and for athletes it is possible to use the dream state to deliberately practice sport skills while physically asleep. In this study,...
The term lucid dream designates a dream in which the dreamer, while dreaming, is aware he or she is dreaming. Whereas lucid dreaming has been studied in adults, large-scaled surveys in children are scarce. The sample here included 3579 children for the ages from 6 to 18 who completed a brief questionnaire distributed in UK libraries. 43.5% reported having had at least one lucid dream. As...
This study evaluates gender differences in dream recall frequency, dream sharing frequency, dream listening frequency and nightmare frequency in childhood and adolescence. The sample included 3534 children for the ages from 6 to 18 who completed a brief questionnaire distributed in libraries. We were able to show that overall girls recalled dreams more often, shared dreams more often, listened...
Dreaming in patients with schizophrenia was and is of particular interest to researchers and clinicians due to the phenomenological similarities between the dreaming state and schizophrenic daytime symptomatology such as bizarre thoughts or hallucinations. Extensive literature reviews have shown that dream studies in the field of psychopathology often do not fulfill common scientific criteria....
Many studies have reported gender differences in nightmare frequency. In order to study this difference systematically, data from 111 independent studies have been included in the meta-analysis reported here. Overall, estimated effect sizes regarding the gender difference in nightmare frequency differed significantly from zero in three age groups of healthy persons (adolescents, young adults,...
Lucid dreams occur when a person is aware that he is dreaming while he is dreaming. In a representative sample of German adults (N = 919), 51% of the participants reported that they had experienced a lucid dream at least once. Lucid dream recall was significantly higher in women and negatively correlated with age. However, these effects might be explained by the frequency of dream recall, as...
The discussion between J. Allan Hobson and Michael Schredl covers a broad variety of topics that are still“hot” in dream research. The starting point is the continuity hypothesis of dreaming which is complemented by AllanHobson’s theory of protoconsciousness. Whereas there is no disagreement that waking life is reflected in dreams, thediscussion evolves around discontinuity, i.e., how dream...
Dream books have a very long history, but systematic research on how many people have read magazine articles or books on dreams and whether reading such literature is beneficial to the dreamer is scarce. In the present sample of 444 people (mostly psychology students), about 75% of the participants stated that they had read at least one magazine article on dreams, and more than 40% had read at...
Important sports events are highlights and stressful situations in every athlete's career. This stress might alter the dream content of athletes and consequently evoke disturbed dreaming. In this study, the authors asked 840 German athletes from various sports about distressing dreams on the nights before an important competition or game. About 15% of the athletes stated that they experienced...
Despite the large number of studies addressing gender differences in dream recall and dream content, research regarding whether these differences might be affected by sex role orientation is rather scarce. The present online-survey included a large sample of most recent dreams. The results clearly indicate that sex role orientation (femininity/expressivity and masculinity/instrumentality)...
Very little is known about dreams in patients with obsessive compulsive disorder, especially regarding changes over the course of treatment with stimulus exposure and response prevention. By use of dream content analysis, 40 dreams of 9 obsessive compulsive (OC) inpatients were compared with 84 dreams of 10 matched OC outpatients and 63 dreams of 11 healthy control participants. Dream protocols...
Nocturnal dreams can be considered as a kind of simulation of the real world on a higher cognitive level. Within lucid dreams, the dreamer is able to control the ongoing dream content and is free to do what he or she wants. In this pilot study, the possibility of practicing a simple motor task in a lucid dream was studied. Forty participants were assigned to a lucid dream practice group, a...
Although sleep is widely investigated in children with ADHD, dream studies in this group are completely lacking. The continuity hypothesis of dreaming stating that waking life is reflected in dreams would predict that waking-life symptoms are reflected in the dreams of such children. 103 children with ADHD and 100 controls completed a dream questionnaire eliciting dream recall frequency and the...
Emotions are an integral part of dreaming. From the viewpoint of the continuity hypothesis, two areas are of interest: how are dream emotions affected by day-time mood and how do dream emotions affect subsequent waking life. Seventy-four participants kept a diary over a 2-week period recording daytime mood, emotional valence of daytime events, and their dreams. Confirming earlier findings, the...
Dream content analysis is one of the basic methods applied in psychological dream research. The method can be easily applied but several pitfalls must be avoided in order to get valid results. The present article outlines how to construct new scales and the problems related to reliability and validity of content analytic scales. In addition, statistical issues prominent in the analysis of dream...
A considerable amount of studies have shown that sleep facilitates memory consolidation. For procedural memory, some findings support the association with REM sleep but the relationship between memory consolidation and dreaming has been scarcely studied. The present study did not find an effect of direct incorporations of the mirror tracing task into the dream on over-night improvement. On the...
Research has demonstrated stable gender differences in dream recall and dream content. Previous matching studies using student samples showed that the judges were able to correctly match the dreamer’s gender based on a single dream report with a probability better than chance. Using dream reports from a non-student sample only slightly increased the accuracy of matching gender despite the fact...
A question about déjà rêve (already dreamt, a form of déjà experience) was included in a large "sleep, dreams, and personality" survey of 444 (mainly psychology) students at three German universities. The incidence of déjà rêve was high (95.2%) and, like most other déjà experiences, was negatively correlated with age. In addition to dream recall frequency, the most influential personality...
Varying research perspectives of the conceptual distinction between physiology and subjective experience, and the outside vs. inside perspective on dreaming will be discussed. Whereas the AIM model is helpful in describing the neurobiological differences between states of consciousness, research is needed to test whether specific features of the subjective experience like bizarreness or...
The International Journal of Dream Research is reaching its third year. The two issues of 2009 included 13 original papers and one invited essay. These articles covered a large variety of topics like lucid dreaming, dream recall, dream content, nightmares, dreams and psychopathology, and sleep quality. Submissions from all over the world including Canada, the United States of America, the...
This article reviews the dissertation of Wilhelm Weygandt that was supervised by Wilhelm Wundt. The claim of the author that all dreams emanate from sensory impression is not valid anymore; nevertheless the careful observations and experiments yielded interesting results which should be studied in-depth using modern methodology, for example, the effect of internal stimuli on dream content.