Different Factors Affect Different Aspects of Dream Recall

Dream recall is necessary for studying dream content, so factors like personality traits that influence recall may bias dream research findings. Different aspects of recall—frequency, detail, and long-term memory—are affected by different factors or to different degrees by the same factor, such as imagination. Whether these variables confound content analyses that use different sampling methods (most recent dreams, diary dreams, or laboratory dreams) is not well understood. The results indicate a clear need for systematic research to improve the representativeness of dream content findings.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Dream recall is naturally a prerequisite for eliciting dream content. Therefore it is of importance to study factors (e.g., personality traits) that might affect dream recall because these factors might bias the content analytic findings in the field of dream research. The present findings indicate that different aspects of dream recall (dream recall frequency, dream recall detail, long-term dream memory) are affected by different factors or at least in different magnitudes by the same factors (e.g., imagination). Whether these variables have a confounding effect on dream content analytic findings using different sampling methods (most recent dreams, diary dreams, and laboratory dreams) is poorly understood, but the present results clearly indicate that there is a need for systematic research in this area in order to increase the representativeness of content analytic findings.