Correction to Yu (2010).

Reports an error in "Contemporary Chinese sex symbols in dreams: Correction to Yu" by Calvin Kai-Ching Yu (Dreaming, 2010[Mar], Vol 20[1], 25-41). The publishing year of the article in the correction notice was listed incorrectly as 2009. The correct publication year for the original article is 2010. The word were was also misspelled in the body of the correction as where. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2010-05656-003.) [Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 20(2) of Dreaming (see record 2010-12874-005). Three Chinese characters where printed incorrectly in the article. The correct symbols are shown along with the location of each in the original article. An error is also located on page 26, 3rd paragraph from the top, second symbol in the third sentence from the bottom of the paragraph. On page 28, 1st paragraph, the 1st symbol in line 7 of the paragraph is incorrect. The last error is on page 28, in which the 1st paragraph, 1st symbol in the last line of the paragraph is incorrect.] The present study aimed to determine how often Chinese people dream of sexual metaphors and to examine the association between the dreaming of sexual experiences and contemporary Chinese sex symbols. A list of sex symbols was derived from a thorough review of the sexual analogies that Chinese people most often use in slang language. This list, together with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Revised–Short Form, was administrated to a sample of 608 upper-secondary school graduates from Hong Kong. It was found that the participants rarely dreamed about food analogies for sex, such as “eating litchis” and “bananas or banana-like objects.” By contrast, sex symbols involving weapons and aggressive behavior, such as “knives, swords, or daggers” and “shooting,” occurred in dreams with moderate prevalence rates. Moreover, gender, the frequency of dreaming sexual experiences, and social desirability significantly predicted the frequency scores on the scale formed by these aggressive symbols for sex. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contemporary chinese sex symbols in dreams.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 20(3) of Dreaming (see record 2010-17362-003). The publishing year of the article in the correction notice was listed incorrectly as 2009. The correct publication year for the original article is 2010. The word were was also misspelled in the body of the correction as where.] [Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 20(2) of Dreaming (see record 2010-12874-005). Three Chinese characters where printed incorrectly in the article. The correct symbols are shown along with the location of each in the original article. An error is also located on page 26, 3rd paragraph from the top, second symbol in the third sentence from the bottom of the paragraph. On page 28, 1st paragraph, the 1st symbol in line 7 of the paragraph is incorrect. The last error is on page 28, in which the 1st paragraph, 1st symbol in the last line of the paragraph is incorrect.] The present study aimed to determine how often Chinese people dream of sexual metaphors and to examine the association between the dreaming of sexual experiences and contemporary Chinese sex symbols. A list of sex symbols was derived from a thorough review of the sexual analogies that Chinese people most often use in slang language. This list, together with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Revised–Short Form, was administrated to a sample of 608 upper-secondary school graduates from Hong Kong. It was found that the participants rarely dreamed about food analogies for sex, such as “eating litchis” and “bananas or banana-like objects.” By contrast, sex symbols involving weapons and aggressive behavior, such as “knives, swords, or daggers” and “shooting,” occurred in dreams with moderate prevalence rates. Moreover, gender, the frequency of dreaming sexual experiences, and social desirability significantly predicted the frequency scores on the scale formed by these aggressive symbols for sex. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ancient Chinese sex symbols in dreams.

This study aimed to determine how often Chinese people dream ancestral sex symbols and to examine the association between dreaming sexual experiences and the Chinese sex symbols. The modified Typical Dreams Questionnaire with 10 additional items about the Chinese sex symbols was administered to a sample of 107 male and 241 female university students in Hong Kong. Both the prevalence and frequency rates indicated that most ancestral Chinese sex symbols do not constitute prominent dream themes in contemporary Chinese people's dreams. The Chinese genital symbols, caves and towers, were found to be relatively prominent in dreams. However, both symbols were neither positively nor negatively associated with the dream theme sexual experiences and the classical psychoanalytic sex symbols, such as snakes. In contrast, the Chinese symbols of sexual activity, such as birds eating fish, had mild, negative correlations with the dream theme sexual experiences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sex dreams, wet dreams, and nocturnal emissions.

This study provides an overview of the frequencies and narrative features of sex and wet dreams and investigates the incestuous behavior in the manifest content of dreams. A questionnaire specially designed for capturing both quantitative and qualitative aspects of sex and wet dreams was administered to 58 male participants. More than 80% of participants had dreamed about having vaginal intercourse with a woman. Dreaming of sexual interactions other than vaginal intercourse—such as oral sex—was also common. Consistent with the hypothesis that latent sexual motives or some variation of sexuality that people may not be aware of during the daytime would emerge at night through dreaming, both homosexual and incestuous behaviors were observed in dreams. In addition, the finding indicates that sexual thoughts and motives can be represented by symbols in dreams, and dream impressions involving no erotic scenes are capable of eliciting nocturnal emissions. It seems that sex dreams, wet dreams, and nocturnal emissions without erotic imagery or dreaming can be distinguished from each other. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Erratum: Human Demography in the Pleistocene: Do Mitochondrial and Nuclear Genes Tell the Same Story? Evol. Anthropol. 8: 81–86.

Eugene E. Harris and Jody Hey (1999). Human Demography in the Pleistocene: Do Mitochondrial and Nuclear Genes Tell the Same Story? Evol. Anthropol. 8: 81–86. On page 84 at the end of 1st paragraph of the 2nd column should read “. . .intergenetic variation Xq 13.3 to about 535,000 years,³⁹. . .” On page 84 in the 2nd paragraph of the 3rd column should read “. . .and seem to indicate widespread or restricted gene flow among populations.”^19,48,49 On page 85 in the 2nd paragraph of the 1st column should read “. . .united by gene flow at zones of overlap.”⁵³     

Content analysis does not belong in any theoretical category: A comment on Hartmann's "meteorite–gemstone" continuum.

This brief comment provides a detailed critique of the inclusion of the widely used Hall and Van de Castle (1966) coding system for the study of dream content in the “meteorite” category in a recent article by Ernest Hartmann (2010), a category for theorists who presumably believe that dreams come from “somewhere else.” The critique notes that content analysis is a methodology, not a theory, and that it has been used to study newspaper articles, speeches, and many other mundane texts. In the case of dream studies, it has produced results that have led many dream researchers to conclude that dreams belonged in Hartmann's “gemstone” category, a category for cognitively oriented theorists who see dreaming as 1 point on a continuum that includes daydreaming, reveries, and more rigorous focused thought. Several other problems with Hartmann's discussion of content analysis are also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reflections on the meanings of dreams prompted by reading Stekel.

What does it mean to interpret a dream? While reading Stekel, an underappreciated but fascinating author, I was struck both by his keen insights as well as his interpretive limitations. This led to broader questions concerning the polyvocal concept of “meaning” in the interpretation of dreams. This article suggests the meaning of dreams can include wish fulfillments, univocal translations, clarifying the life context, morphological equivalences, associations, and personal history. Stepping back, even the question of “interpretation” versus “appreciation” reminds us that the need, if any, for interpretation will vary depending on who is asking the question. Indeed, reflections on the “who” or ego in the dream leads beyond dreaming to ultimate questions concerning the reality of ego and meditative reflections on what it means to truly be awake and aware of life as it is. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Meteorite or gemstone? Dreaming as one end of a continuum of functioning: Implications for research and for the use of dreams in therapy and self-knowledge.

Is a dream a meteorite—a bit of material arriving from a distant place that needs to be carefully analyzed to give us knowledge about that place (outside or inside us)? Is it a strange text which has come to us in a foreign language, that needs to be translated into our own? This “meteorite view” is held by some religious and spiritual persons, by many orthodox psychoanalysts and other therapists, and implicitly by many researchers. They all see the dream as something alien, something totally different from our ordinary mental functioning. This paper presents a great deal of research favoring an alternate view—that the dream is an earth-stone, not an alien stone. It may be impressive and beautiful (gemstone), but it's still an earth-stone. The dream is part of our mental functioning. It is one end of a continuum, running from focused waking thought, through looser thought, fantasy, daydreaming, reverie and dreaming. We review reasons why dreams are often considered “totally different”: they're perceptual, not conceptual; they're bizarre; they are “so real”; they're so easily forgotten; they're involuntary; they occur in REM sleep—a totally different state. We demonstrate that none of these reasons are persuasive. In each sense, there is overlap between dreams and other forms of functioning. The continuum view leads to different kinds of research and a different style of dreamwork. It also helps answer questions the field has long struggled with including: Should we study “a dream” or “dreaming”? Are dreams meaningful or meaningless? (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Do the Blind Literally "See" in Their Dreams? A Critique of a Recent Claim That They Do.

This article provides a critique of a recent inaccurate claim by Bértolo et al (see record 2003-04658-011) that the congenitally blind literally "see" in their dreams, which flies in the face of findings that were established in 3 careful previous studies. It first shows how this claim arose through a blurring of the distinction between actual seeing through the visual system and imagery that preserves spatial and metric properties without specific reliance on the visual system. It then discusses the 3 mistaken reasons for this blurring. This correction is important beyond the specific issue of seeing in dreams because the original findings lend important support for a cognitive theory of dreaming by showing that the imagery necessary for dreaming develops between ages 4 and 7. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotions before, during, and after dreaming sleep.

The aim of this study was to provide a preliminary overview of the emotions before, during, and after dreaming sleep in Chinese people. One hundred Chinese participants were included in the study. Cheerful emotions, including interest, exhilaration, and enjoyment, were pervasive in the collected dreams, although anxiety was also a common type of emotion. Positive correlations were found between the intensities of dream, presleep, and postsleep emotions. Significant reductions in intensity were noted in the analyses of emotions preceding dreaming sleep versus emotions following dreaming sleep. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Normal Grief and Complicated Bereavement Among Traumatized Cambodian Refugees: Cultural Context and the Central Role of Dreams of the Dead

This article profiles bereavement among traumatized Cambodian refugees and explores the validity of a model of how grief and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) interact in this group to form a unique bereavement ontology, a model in which dreams of the dead play a crucial role. Several studies were conducted at a psychiatric clinic treating Cambodian refugees who survived the Pol Pot genocide. Key findings included that Pol Pot deaths were made even more deeply disturbing owing to cultural ideas about “bad death” and the consequences of not performing mortuary rites; that pained recall of the dead in the last month was common (76 % of patients) and usually caused great emotional and somatic distress; that severity of pained recall of the dead was strongly associated with PTSD severity (r = .62); that pained recall was very often triggered by dreaming about the dead, usually of someone who died in the Pol Pot period; and that Cambodians have a complex system of interpretation of dreams of the deceased that frequently causes those dreams to give rise to great distress. Cases are provided that further illustrate the centrality of dreams of the dead in the Cambodian experiencing of grief and PTSD. The article shows that not assessing dreams and concerns about the spiritual status of the deceased in the evaluation of bereavement results in “category truncation,” i.e., a lack of content validity, a form of category fallacy.     

Gender differences in dreams: Applications to dream work with male clients.

Differences between the dreams of men and women have been a topic of interest and research in the field of dream science. This article focuses on three such gender differences in dreaming, namely, dream recall frequency, sex of dream character and dream aggression. For each gender difference, a review of literature is presented, along with a discussion of possible causes for the difference between genders. In addition, suggestions are made for applications to clinical practice with a focus on gender-specific dream work strategies for work with male clients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sexual selection and sperm competition in primates: What are male genitalia good for?

One hundred twenty-five years ago, in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex,¹ Charles Darwin proposed the theory of sexual selection, as distinct from natural selection, to explain why, in some species, males have such magnificent ornaments and, in other species, such impressive weapons. He suggested two processes, which we now term female choice and male-male competition: either females choose particularly ornate males or, alternatively, relatively passive females accept the winner of fights among males. By now, knowledge of species in which the females are more brightly colored or aggressive than males has led to a more general formulation of the principle of sexual selection, in which, instead of “females”, we write “the sex with the lower potential reproductive rate”, and, instead of “male”, “the sex with the higher potential reproductive rate”.²     

Detecting meaning in dream reports: An extension of a word search approach.

Building on previous investigations of waking–dreaming continuities using word search technology (Bulkeley 2009a, 2009b; Domhoff & Schneider, 2008), we demonstrate that a blind analysis of a dream series using only word search methods can accurately predict many important aspects of the individual's waking life, including personality attributes, relationships, activities, and cultural preferences. Results from a study of the “Van” dream series (N = 192) show that blind inferences drawn from a word search analysis were almost entirely accurate according to the dreamer. After presenting these findings we discuss several remaining shortcomings and suggest ways of improving the method for use by other researchers involved in the search for a more systematic understanding of meaning in dreams. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A systems analog mime for color vision disorders in humans

A multiunit processing system mime for human color vision is presented. This processing system is composed of a sequence of black box units which encode the visual field and subsequently decode the visual field in the following manner. A “primary retinal encoder” performs an internal digitization of the visual field in both color and intensity. A “fundamental symbol translating unit” encodes the color and intensity patterns into a new pattern containing the fundamental symbols. This encoding is done via a Gödel transformation of the fundamental symbol patterns. The symbols needed to execute this transformation are found in an encoded table called the “symbol translation table.” Finally, the “Gödel signal generator” translates the fundamental symbol pattern into an electrical signal which is sent to a decoding region in the visual cortex and lateral geniculate body. This region is also tied to the symbol translation table, and is then used to decode the electrical signal back to the visual field. It is shown that various errors/failures in these black box units may lead to a wide variety of visual problems which mimic human disorders. These disorders include color blindness, color weakness, dyslexic problems, and a new disorder called visual field fluctuation.     

Refocusing the Neurocognitive Approach to Dreams: A Critique of the Hobson Versus Solms Debate.

This article examines the ongoing debate between activation-synthesis theorist J. Allan Hobson and psychoanalytic theorist Mark Solms about the nature of dreaming and dream content. After discussing their neurophysiological disagreements, it argues that they are more similar than different in some important ways, especially in talking about dreams in the same breath as psychosis and in drawing conclusions about dream content on the basis of their neurophysiological assumptions, without any reference to the systematic findings on the issue. Evidence from inside and outside the sleep laboratory on the coherent nature of most dreams is presented to demonstrate that neither theorist is on solid ground in his main assertions. Dreaming is usually a far more realistic and understandable enactment of interests and concerns than the 2 researchers assume. In addition, several of Hobson's and Solms's claims concerning the neural basis of dreaming are challenged on the basis of neurophysiological evidence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bicultural dreaming as an intersubjective communicative process.

Research in the human sciences has undergone a radical shift in perspective from considering the world as a collection of objects (objectivity) or subjects (subjectivity) to understanding the world as a set of dialogical processes and psychodynamic relationships (intersubjectivity). Likewise, the ethnography of dreaming has changed from a simple gathering, arrangement, interpretation, and statistical comparison of dreams into an intersubjective dialogical communicative and interpretive process. Today, a number of fieldworkers collecting information on dreaming share their own dreams, associations, and interpretations with their subjects, and because of these sociolinguistic practices, they are becoming bicultural. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's grief dreams and the theory of spiritual intelligence.

Throughout history, people have reported dreams that have impacted upon their spiritual lives, some of which are related to death. Dreams related to death are not uncommon in childhood, and research shows that some children make meaning from them. Often this interpretation of a dream reflects a search for meaning about issues of life and death, as well as acting as a coping mechanism. This article explores how children make meaning from this type of dream by synthesizing the theory of spiritual intelligence with theoretical approaches to dreaming. Specifically, it explores the intersection between theoretical approaches to dreams related to death, children's responses to these dreams, and a key function of spiritual intelligence to solve problems of meaning and value in life. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A reply to Hobson (2005).

J. A. Hobson's (2005) commentary merely repeats his past theoretical assertions (see record 2005-02950-002). It asks questions that rest on the refuted hypothesis that real dreaming occurs only in REM sleep and that are already answered in the author's critique. Despite many studies, there is still no evidence that neurophysiological changes during REM are responsible for any unique formal features in dreams. As for the psychological consequences of the neuromodulatory environment during REM, there are no studies. Most important, Hobson overlooks a key point in regard to a new neurocognitive approach to dreams: The many parallels between dreaming and waking cognition raise the intriguing possibility that relatively small changes from waking to sleeping can account for the unique features of dreams, rendering his REM-based speculations irrelevant. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)