Dream Intensity Inventory and Chinese people's dream experience frequencies.

The present study aimed to devise a parsimonious instrument for evaluating both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of dream experiences and to quantify Chinese people's dream experiences in ways that facilitated cross-cultural comparisons. The Dream Intensity Inventory was developed and administered to 348 Chinese university students. Individual differences in dream recall frequency were observed, with some participants recalling dreams almost every morning whereas others recalled dreams less than once a month. By contrast, the Chinese participants exhibited less diverse dream awareness frequencies. Multiple dreams in a single night and nightmares were found to be prevalent among the Chinese participants. On the other hand, fewer than half of the participants experienced regularly voluntary control over dream activities and consciousness. The factor analyses of the items in the Dream Intensity Inventory resulted in three readily interpreted factors, which were labeled as the "dream quantity," "altered dream episodes," and "dream vividness" subscales, respectively. When compared with men, women participants had higher frequencies of regular dream experiences including dream awareness, nightmares, and multiple dreams, as measured by the dream quantity subscale. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceived change in the affect associated with dreams: The fading affect bias and its moderators.

Eighty-two undergraduate participants kept dream diaries for a month. Five dreams were randomly selected from each diary and were returned to participants. They rated the affect produced by the dream at its occurrence and at its recall, as well as a number of other characteristics of the dream and characteristics of the context in which the dream occurred. Results revealed that, like memories for real autobiographical events, the negative affect associated with dreams generally faded faster than the positive affect associated with dreams (a Fading Affect Bias, or FAB). The data also showed that the FAB did not occur for: (a) dreams that were remembered to contain information that dreamers believed came true at a later date, (b) dreamers who had reportedly taken recreational drugs prior to their dream, (c) dreams remembered as lacking sound, and (d) dreams remembered as very quiet. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dream content: Reflections of the emotional and psychological states of earthquake survivors.

This study investigated dream narratives as reflections of the emotional and psychological states of earthquake survivors. Dreams and dreams imagery have reportedly been affected by the emotional and psychological trauma that the dreamer goes through. Dream narratives and dream content ratings used in earlier studies were utilized in this study. Narratives and content ratings were obtained from a sample of 27 volunteer survivors of the October 8, 2005 earthquake in Pakistan (Azad Kashmir area) and 27 volunteer controls from similar demographics. Three independent raters judged the dream narratives and dream content ratings. The judges rating were highly congruent (86.05). Findings revealed that the survivor group had more vivid, unpleasant, horrifying, and hostile dreams compared with the control group. However, there were no significant gender differences. The data suggest that a closer study of dreams can be used to understand the underlying trauma for effective interventions. In addition, interesting emergence of recurrent dreams was seen, which will be independently studied in future. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attachment styles and emotional content, stress, and conflict in dreams of romantic partners.

Expanding on previous research investigating the link between dreams and attachment, participants in committed dating relationships were recruited to fill out dream diaries for 1 week. It was hypothesized that when dreaming about romantic partners (attachment figures), dream content would vary by attachment style, such that insecurely attached individuals would experience a different quality of dream, emotionally and cognitively. At Time 1, participants completed a self-report measure of attachment style, and then completed a dream diary at home each morning for 7 days. Dreams that contained romantic partners were coded by double-blind research assistants for emotional content, with a focus on attachment-related emotions and stressful expressions. Anxious-attached and avoidant-attached participants experienced significantly more stress and conflict, and scored significantly higher on specific emotions such as anxiety and jealousy in such dreams. Secure scores did not correlate with any specific or general emotion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dream Recall Frequency and Dream Detail as Mediated by Personality, Behavior, and Attitude

Many studies investigated how personality, behavior, and attitude mediate dream recall, but few distinguish between measures of dream recall frequency: the number of dreams experienced in a specified time frame and dream detail: individual ratings of vividness or detailed content of dreams. This study compared undergraduates' (n = 173) self-reported dream recall frequency, and dream detail, with behaviors, attitude toward dreaming, and scores on scales of Extraversion/Introversion and Type A/B. Dream recall frequency and dream detail manifested different patterns of association in relation to behaviors, attitude and personality. Dream recall frequency was associated with the frequency of experiencing emotionally disturbing dreams and trying to interpret dreams, while detail of dreams was associated with positive attitude toward dreaming and Type B personality. Although males and females both held positive attitudes toward dreaming, females experienced more emotionally disturbing dreams and felt unable to control their dreams. Interactions between personality and gender emerged for behaviors associated with dreaming. Researchers are encouraged to differentiate between dream recall frequency and dream detail.     

Do we think dreams are in black and white due to memory problems?

The present study was designed to investigate whether memory processes play a role in why some persons say their dreams are black and white. The findings indicate that the percentages of black and white dreams are related negatively to color memory and dream recall frequency. When colors were recorded immediately after the dream was recorded, the percentage of black and white dream elements dropped to 2.7%. When participants were presented the option that dream colors might not be remembered, the percentage of explicit black and white dreams became very small, and the findings are thus in line with the continuity hypothesis of dreaming. Future studies might use extensive training of color memory and dream recall in order to investigate whether highly trained persons still have some dreams or dream elements that are in black and white. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dream emotions, waking emotions, personality characteristics and well-being--A positive psychology approach.

The study aimed to discover whether personality characteristics and waking emotions relate to dreaming emotions. There were 123 participants, ranging in age from 17 to 82 years. It was hypothesized that participants with significant positive emotional trait and state ratings in waking life would experience more positive dreams. Data collection utilized diaries and questionnaires, including Hartmann's Boundary Questionnaire, IPIP Emotional Stability Scale, Staats' Hope Scale, Adult Dispositional Hope Scale, and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule to assess personality and attitudinal characteristics. Participants recorded and rated their waking and dream emotions over a 3-week period. Median correlations between corresponding waking and dream emotions were .58 for positive emotions and .47 for negative emotions. There were also low, but significant correlations between some personality characteristics and participants' tendency to experience positive or negative emotions in dreams. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dream and blog content analysis of a long term diary of a video game player with obsessive compulsive disorder.

A case study of a young man who is an avid video game player and designer is the focus of this paper. His online Website offers over 800 dreams, of which over half were content analyzed using the Hall and Van de Castle system. Also available were daily blogs. Thus, several research questions could be addressed. Did the diary evidence consistency across time? Did the dreams evidence incorporation of activities discussed in the daily blogs from the day before the dream? Did this one individual's dream diary echo former research into the dreams of video game players? A final question was addressed because of the diagnosis of the diarist as having Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Did the dreams of this young man echo previous research into dreams of OCD sufferers? The findings were that the diary was consistent across time and there was incorporation of some elements of the daily blog into subsequent dreams. Some aspects of his dreams echoed previous video game players' dream findings, like more dead and imaginary characters. Finally, the OCD analysis only partly replicated the previous research into the dreams of those with OCD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Assessing the dream-lag effect for REM and NREM stage 2 dreams

This study investigates evidence, from dream reports, for memory consolidation during sleep. It is well-known that events and memories from waking life can be incorporated into dreams. These incorporations can be a literal replication of what occurred in waking life, or, more often, they can be partial or indirect. Two types of temporal relationship have been found to characterize the time of occurrence of a daytime event and the reappearance or incorporation of its features in a dream. These temporal relationships are referred to as the day-residue or immediate incorporation effect, where there is the reappearance of features from events occurring on the immediately preceding day, and the dream-lag effect, where there is the reappearance of features from events occurring 5-7 days prior to the dream. Previous work on the dream-lag effect has used spontaneous home recalled dream reports, which can be from Rapid Eye Movement Sleep (REM) and from non-Rapid Eye Movement Sleep (NREM). This study addresses whether the dream-lag effect occurs only for REM sleep dreams, or for both REM and NREM stage 2 (N2) dreams. 20 participants kept a daily diary for over a week before sleeping in the sleep laboratory for 2 nights. REM and N2 dreams collected in the laboratory were transcribed and each participant rated the level of correspondence between every dream report and every diary record. The dream-lag effect was found for REM but not N2 dreams. Further analysis indicated that this result was not due to N2 dream reports being shorter, in terms of number of words, than the REM dream reports. These results provide evidence for a 7-day sleep-dependent non-linear memory consolidation process that is specific to REM sleep, and accord with proposals for the importance of REM sleep to emotional memory consolidation.     

Sleep and dream patterns of political liberals and conservatives.

In this study the author examined the dreams of American liberals and conservatives to highlight patterns that might correlate with their opposing political views. A total of 234 participants (134 self-described liberals and 100 self-described conservatives) completed a lengthy sleep and dream survey, and their answers revealed several notable patterns. People of both political persuasions shared a common substrate of basic human sleep and dream experience. Conservatives slept somewhat more soundly, with fewer remembered dreams. Liberals were more restless in their sleep and had a more active and varied dream life. In contrast to a previous study, liberals reported a somewhat greater proportion of bad dreams and nightmares. Consistent with earlier research, the dreams of conservatives were more mundane, whereas the dreams of liberals were more bizarre. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Book Review

ABSTRACT

Previous studies conducted in the United States and Venezuela have demonstrated that people can correctly match portraits of unknown purebred dogs with their owners at statistically significant levels, suggesting that the popular belief in dog–owner physical resemblance is empirically valid. We investigated the perceived physical resemblance of dog–owner pairs in Japan, where the owners are racially more homogenous than in the countries in which the previous studies were conducted. In experiment 1, the matching performance by naïve judges was statistically significant, and a supplementary test suggested that perceived dog–owner physical resemblance plays a critical role in this. Experiment 2 presented a new procedure to test the perceived dog–owner physical resemblance and demonstrated that two-thirds of the judges selected a set of 20 real dog–owner pairs over a set of 20 fake dog–owner pairs, irrespective of whether it was an ownership-guessing task or a resemblance-based choice task. The ability to match correct dog–owner pairs (experiment 1) and the sensitivity to differentiate between real and fake dog–owner pairs (experiment 2) were not unique to the characteristics of the judges (e.g., whether or not they were dog lovers) because the task performance was independent of any measured judge-related factor. These results, taken together, provide another piece of positive evidence for the popular belief that there is a physical resemblance between dogs and their owners. Furthermore, the demonstration of dog–owner physical resemblance with racially homogeneous owner samples supports the generality and robustness of this phenomenon. The mechanism underlying this phenomenon (i.e., owners' selection of dogs that look like themselves or the convergence of appearance over time), however, remains to be elucidated by future studies.     

Exotic Dreams: A Cross-Cultural Study

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 per participant was utilized, 910 dream reports from women and 756 from men. Scoring criteria were determined in advance for creative, lucid, healing, dreams within dreams, out-of-body, telepathic, mutual (and shared), clairvoyant, precognitive, past-life, initiation, and visitation dreams. When a dream fell into two categories, it received a score of 0.5 for each of the categories, rather than a score of 1.0, awarded when a dream represented a single category. In the sample of 1,666 dreams, there were 135 (8.1%) exotic dreams. Female dreamers reported 77 (8.5% of all female reports) exotic dreams, while male dreamers reported 58 (7.7% of all male reports), the difference was not statistically significant. The country with the highest percentage of exotic dream reports was Russia (12.7% of the total number reported by Russian seminar participants), followed by Brazil (10.9%), Argentina (9.0%), Japan (8.1%), Ukraine (5.9%), and the United States (5.7%). When chi square statistics were applied, it was found that Russian dreamers reported significantly more exotic dreams than dreamers in Ukraine or the United States.     

Dream relevance and the continuity hypothesis: Believe it or not?

The dream-related beliefs of two university samples were surveyed and analyzed: (a) the belief that dreams contain important information; and (b) the belief that dreams reflect aspects of waking life. In addition, this study investigated the relationships between dream-related beliefs and both dream content and waking life measures of health, mood, and self-construal. The majority of participants maintained the belief that dreams contain important information, and participants were most likely to believe that dreams reflect relationships and decisions being made. Those believing that dreams reflect their spirituality scored higher on metapersonal self-construal and reported fewer deaths in their dreams. In contrast, those maintaining the belief that dreams reflect physical health scored lower on physical functioning and reported more body parts in their dreams. Within this demographic, findings suggest a common belief in dream relevance and waking-dreaming continuity. Further research is needed in order to fully account for possible sources of these beliefs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of a two-week reflection-intention training program on lucid dream recall.

Previous research in the field of lucid dreams has produced several techniques which are claimed to be a means of inducing lucid dreams, but there have been only a small number of reported studies which have evaluated their effectiveness. The present study investigated the effects of one of the most promising of these, the reflection-intention technique, which is specifically designed to increase the frequency of dream and lucid dream recall. The sample here consisted of 20 participants whose frequencies of normal dream recall and lucid dream recall were recorded before, during and after a two week training program by using a dream questionnaire and a dream journal: A one-way repeated measures analysis of variance showed a significant increase in both dream recall frequency (F2,38 = 22.09, p2,38 = 5.96, p     

Dreaming,fenfluramine, and vitamin C.

The effect of increasing doses of fenfluramine on dream patterns was studied in 20 patients receiving a reducing diet with or without a controlled dietary intake of vitamin C daily. The dream pattern was unchanged in six patients and dreams disappeared in another who normally dreamed often. In 13 patients dreams increased in frequency and intensity, and in five the dreams assumed frightening proportions. There was a significant straight-line relation between response and the size of the dose. When placebo tablets were given to four patients their dreams disappeared or assumed their pretreatment normal pattern. Absence of vitamin C from the diet did not significantly affect the dream pattern. That fenfluramine has dose-related cerebral effects should be remembered in patients with a history of mental illness.     

Dream content and memory processing: Dream lag effects within a single night and across several nights: A pilot study.

Dream content may reflect elements of memory processing occurring within a single night and across several days or weeks. One 19-year-old healthy female college student kept a daily diary, a sleep diary, and recorded her dreams for 2 months. A preset alarm clock allowed her to sample dreams from both early NREM-rich and late REM-rich sleep. Dreams were examined for memory elements that were similar to diary entries. There were 55 scorable dreams obtained during 25 nights. Matches between dream elements and daytime events occurred quite frequently depending on dream element. Dream characters, actions, themes, and settings more often matched daytime memories than dream objects, emotions, or events. Matches were also time dependent. Emotions appeared in dreams after the subject experienced them sooner than all other elements (1.5 days), while objects took the longest to appear in dreams (3.5 days). With respect to within night cognitive processing, 42% of scorable nights contained the same memory elements in the first and last dreams and 8% of scorable nights contained the same emotion within the same context between an early and late dream. Selected dream elements appear to reflect memory processing occurring throughout the night and over the course of several days. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Facilitating dream recall in Chinese people.

The aim of this study was to examine the frequency of dream recall in Chinese people and to develop nonintrusive procedures to facilitate dream recall. Guidelines for remembering dreams (dream recall instructions) were established based on a review of the existing literature on dream recall and its associated factors. The efficacy of the dream recall experience was explored using this procedure in neurologically healthy individuals. One hundred seventy Chinese participants were included in the study: 100 received the dream recall instructions, and 70 did not. The recall instructions were shown to be effective in triggering dream recall in the participants. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Relationship of Dream Content and Changes in Daytime Mood in Traumatized vs. Non-Traumatized Children

The study examined how the mood changes from night to morning, and how dysphoric dream contents associate with this change among children who live in traumatic environment and their controls from peaceful area. The sample consisted of 413 Palestinian boys and girls of 6–15 years of age, the mean age being 11.22 ± 2.64. The participants filled in a seven-day dream diary in which they recorded their recalled dreams every morning. First, the results, confirmed that mood change from evening to morning is a general dream function: age and gender are not related to the change. The mood chance was rather associated with what and whom the children dreamt about. Second, the hypothesis of the trauma group showing less change in dysphoric dream content and in the intensity of negative morning mood across a period of time of seven days was not confirmed. On the contrary, the results showed that both dreams incorporating dysphoric themes and negative morning mood decreased only among children living in traumatic conditions. Third, it was hypothesized that there is a stronger association between presleep negative mood and dysphoric dreams, as well as between the dysphoric dreams and negative morning mood among children living in traumatic environment than among children from peaceful area. Contrary to the hypothesis, results for the trauma group revealed a reverse association between evening mood and dream contents: the more afraid, angry and worried children felt in the evening, the more Happy recreation dreams they reported, and the happier evening mood they reported, the more Threatening stranger dreams they had. However, concurring with the hypothesis, a direct association was found between dysphoric dreams and negative morning mood in the trauma group. The more children dreamt about Threatening strangers, the more afraid, angry and worried they felt in the morning. The discussion proposes a model of the correcting or balancing dream function that is characterized by an reverse assimilation of incorporating evening mood into dreams, and by a direct accommodation of dream content into morning mood.     

Interest in dream interpretation: A gender difference.

Although several studies reported a significant effect with regard to the gender difference in an interest in dreams, the generalizability of these studies is limited because mainly students were recruited as participants. In this study, gender differences with regard to interest in dream interpretation as an indicator of interest in dreams in general have been demonstrated in a representative sample. There was, however, a significant age-gender interaction, indicating that interest in dreams might not be a potent variable for explaining gender differences in dream recall. In future studies, the course of interest in dreams over the life span and any associated gender differences should be investigated using carefully designed scales. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)