Strange Encounters: Dreams and Nightmares of High School Students in Papua New Guinea1
A. L. Epstein
Oceania March 1, 1998 DOI: 10.1002/j.1834-4461.1998.tb02666.x (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Qualitative study Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Population | Papua New Guinea high school students |
| Topics | Dreaming |
| Citations | 6 |
| Key findings | Well over half of the students' dream essays reported negative affect, ranging from nervousness to terror, with anxiety the predominant emotion, most often expressed through encounters with grotesque creatures threatening the dreamer's existence. Positive-affect dreams were mostly of the wish-fulfilment type. The author argues that Ernest Jones's psychoanalytic account of nightmares is not helpful for interpreting this material, while more recent psychoanalytic thinking offers a more promising approach. |
Abstract
ABSTRACT The material for this paper is drawn from essays written, as part of their ordinary class work, by a group of Papua New Guinea High School students, under the title ‘Recently I had a Dream’. The paper offers a content analysis of this material. The categories employed to present and analyse the data are rooted in the assumption that a dream may be likened to the performance of a play or a film viewed on the screen. The dream, that is, tends to be a vivid inner visual as well as an affective experience. Focus on the emotional response that the dream evokes yields a simple scheme that enables one to identify and classify the themes and motifs that the dreams reveal: positive affect (i.e. supportive of the dreamer) or negative (i.e. seen as somehow threatening the dreamer). But the picture may also be more complicated as where there are mixed or changing emotions. Positive affect was reported of those dreams experienced as pleasant or ‘good’; most of these were plainly of the wish‐fulfilment type. But well over half of the students reported experiencing negative affect, emotions ranging in intensity from nervousness through being frightened or scared to terror or being panic stricken. Anxiety indeed was the predominant emotion that found its most frequent expression in strange encounters with grotesque looking creatures which threatened the dreamer's very existence. In what kind of experience(s) was such anxiety rooted? In seeking an answer the data were approached, after the manner of peeling an onion, from a number of perspectives: the sociological (the social situation of the school), the cultural (the relevance of traditional factors, and the psychological (the role of the unconscious). On the last point, the views of the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, set out in his classic study ‘On the Nightmare’, were not found to be helpful. On the other hand, more recent strands in psychoanalytic thinking appear to offer a more promising line of attack.
Comparable studies
Other qualitative studies on dreaming, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Other as a Nightmare: The Israeli-Arab Encounter as Reflected in Children's Dreams in Israel and the West Bank Jewish and Arab fifth to seventh graders living in various settings in Israel and the... | 1989 | Qualitative content analysis | n = 212 |
| Nonwaking Responses to Waking Stressors: Dreams and Nightmares1 Men from the cohort eligible for military duty during the Vietnam Conflict, varying in... | 1990 | Survey interview study | n = 442 |
| Communing with the Gods: The Dreaming Brain in Cross-cultural Perspective | 2011 | Phenomenological study | |
| Partial memory reinstatement while (lucid) dreaming to change the dream environment. Lucid dreamers | 2020 | Qualitative study | |
| Strange themes in pandemic dreams: Insomnia was associated with more negative, anxious and death‐related dreams during the COVID‐19 pandemic Global survey participants | 2022 | Longitudinal mixed-methods study | n = 2,240 |