Goal of this series of cases was to investigate lucid dreaming treatment for nightmares. Hypotheses were that lucid dreaming treatment would decrease nightmare frequency and state/trait anxiety, and improve the quality of sleep. Eight participants received a one-hour individual session, which consisted of lucid dreaming exercises and discussing possible constructive solutions for the nightmare....
This study reports on the number of feelings evoked in men and women by their dream characters as well as on the relative frequency of different kinds of feelings. Thirty-five subjects recorded 320 dreams over a two-week period, submitted dream reports and a dream log of all characters that appeared in their dreams as well as any feelings involving the characters. We found that feelings were...
The present study investigated the relationship between both state and global measures of phenomenal qualities of nightmare experience and nightmare prevalence as measured prospectively by dream logs. Sixty three frequent nightmare individuals and 53 controls completed a retrospective measure of their sleep and dreaming processes and kept a dreaming and nightmare log for 21 consecutive nights....
This pilot study focuses on the relationship of dream content and political ideology in a contemporary U.S. context. The study involved 56 people, 28 (14 male and 14 female) who identified themselves as members of the political right and 28 (14 male and 14 female) who identified themselves as members of the political left. “Most recent dream” reports from these subjects were analyzed using Hall...
Dream questionnaires are widely used in dream research to measure dream recall frequency and various aspects of dream life. The present study has investigated the intercorrelation between questionnaire and diary measures. 285 participants completed a dream question-naire and kept a dream diary over a two-week period. Results indicate that keeping a dream diary increased dream recall in low and...
The purpose of this study was to identify “exotic” (i.e., puzzling, unusual, extraordinary, anomalous) dreams in a sample of 1,666 dream reports from six countries, and to make gender comparisons as well. Research participants were members of dream seminars that one of us conducted between 1990 and 1998 in Argentina, Brazil, Japan, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States. Only one dream report...
Discoveries in three distinct areas of dream research make it possible to suggest the outlines of a new neurocognitive theory of dreaming. The first relevant findings come from assessments of patients with brain injuries, which show that lesions in different areas have differential effects on dreaming and thereby imply the contours of the neural network necessary for dreaming. The second set of...
Social as well as personal referents appear in dreams and, when recognized as such, provide insight into how unresolved social issues seep into the personal domain at an unconscious level. Dream-sharing groups (because of the time available and other factors) offer a particularly favorable opportunity to observe this interplay. The truth-telling nature of dreaming consciousness not only exposes...
The purpose of the present longitudinal study was to determine the extent of consistency in dream content at two periods of adulthood as well as continuity with the psychosocial development of the dreamers. Twenty-one women kept a dream diary for a few weeks at intervals of 10, 15 or 17 years. ANOVAs for repeated measures were performed on the mean frequencies per dreamer of different dream...
Contemporary cognitive and neuropsychological approaches to dreaming show striking methodological and conceptual similarities with the scientific dream literature of the last century. The use of introspective dream reports and the emphasis on dream phenomenology are characteristic of both periods but were bannished during the first half of this century, the former by behaviorism, the latter by...
Maimonides' conception of true dreams posits an important role for the faculty of imagination within the growth of the intellectual self. However, unlike many modern theories of the dream, Maimonides requires one to subject the imagination to intellectual processes, in order to be able to harness the imagination for the practical knowledge. The imagination found in the dream images consists of...
Using dream diary procedures and statistically controlling for age and gender, the present study investigated the relationship between Hartmann's (1991) boundary concept and various aspects of dreaming. Results with a sample of young adults confirmed earlier findings that persons with thin boundaries recall dreams (including nightmares) more often, report dreams that are more negative and...
The present study investigated dream recall and dream content in patients with narcolepsy. Compared to healthy controls, patients with narcolepsy reported higher dream recall frequency and more negatively toned and bizarre dreams, confirming earlier findings.
Prior studies indicate that a personality dimension reflecting thin versus thick boundaries is related to global ratings of dream vividness, amount of emotion, and amount of interaction. In the present study, these relationships were examined by relating scores from the Boundary Questionnaire ( Hartmann, 1991) to dream content among 80 patients seen at a sleep disorders center. Thinness of...
Dream recall was measured retrospectively with the Night Dreaming Scale of the Imaginal Processes Inventory. Evidence supports a high degree of correspondence among methods which assess dreaming frequency. A cross-sectional sample (17-92 years old, n = 2328) found fewer dreams recalled with increasing age. Women recalled more dreams and showed a less rapid decrease in frequency than men....
Following the general idea of a substantial bydimensionality of mind, a cognitive psycholinguistic model is proposed attempting to describe how two thinking modalities - named Y and X - may contribute to the production of a dream report. Based on this model, two sets of syntactical-lexical categories were defined whose counts, divided for report length, should indicate the contribution of the...
A questionnaire approach to investigating dream content was developed and compared to personality ratings of the Five Factor Model (FFM). The themes and overall character of self-reported dreams were examined to determine whether they differed markedly from the dream norms obtained by Hall and Van De Castle (1966). Findings were mostly consistent with past norms obtained from dream diary...
This article reports on a survey of dream characteristics of 48 patients with a variety of dissociative disorders. For most of these disorders, recovery of repressed memories was the most frequent distinctive dream event. For patients with Multiple Personality Disorder, many other phenomena occurred including alters appearing as dream characters, alters who could orchestrate dream content, and...
Flying dreams have anecdotally been suggested to be related to lucid dreams, either by general proximity of occurrence or by flying directly triggering lucidity. The present study of 1910 dreams from 191 subjects found flying dreams were likelier to be reported by subjects reporting lucid dreams or any of three related categories: pre-lucid dreams, dreams of sleep, or false awakenings. When...