Dreaming

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)
How to use Q-methodology in dream research: Assumptions, procedures and benefits.
Current quantitative methods of approaching dream research, which dominate published material about dreams, have led to descriptions of dreams as homogenous events. Q-methodology is an approach that may identify heterogeneity in dream report studies and subsequent dream types based upon the subjectivity of the dream experience. Q-methodology is described as a “Qualiquantological” approach to dream analysis which maximizes the use of statistics in a qualitative way (Stenner & Stainton-Rogers, 2004). “Q” is distinguished from other methods because the dreamer sorts the subjectivity of the dream they are reporting and provides a written description of the dream; these are used together to identify shared patterns of subjectivity within a large data set. The advantages of using Q-methodology are outlined and the resources necessary to conduct a study are shared. The aim of this paper is to present a preliminary explanation prior to presenting the first study to use Q-methodology in dream research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
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)
Dream intensity profile as an indicator of the hysterical tendencies to dissociation and conversion.
The present study explored the clinical utility of the Dream Intensity Scale (DIS) by evaluating the degree to which the components of dream intensity can serve as indicators of the tendencies to hysterical dissociation and conversion, taking neuroticism and psychological boundaries into consideration. The discriminant models constituted by the DIS scales alone differentiated participants who manifested clinically significant dissociative or conversion symptoms from the remaining sample, with the accuracy rate ranging between 67.2% and 71.5%. The discriminative power of the DIS was so impressive that the inclusion in the models of neuroticism, psychological boundaries, and dissociative or conversion levels—the key factors associated with hysteria—raised the correct classification rate by less than 9%. The relationships between neuroticism, boundary thinness, dissociative features, epileptic-like symptoms, and subjective dream intensity were discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
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)
“Gender, sex role orientation and dream recall frequency”: Correction.
Reports an error in "Gender, sex role orientation, and dream recall frequency" by Michael Schredl and Olaf Lahl (Dreaming, 2010[Mar], Vol 20[1], 19-24). In the article, a third author was not listed in the byline and some acknowledgment information was also missing: Third Co-Author: Anja S. Göritz, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany. The name appears in this record. Additional Acknowledgment: We thank the operators of the sites www.panopia.de, www.yougov.de, and www.studivz.net for providing participants. This work was in part supported by DFG grant GO 1107/4-1 to Göritz. The online version of the article has been corrected. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2010-05656-002.) Recently, a large meta-analysis showed that women tend to recall their dreams more often than men. Despite this robust finding, studies focused on explaining the gender difference in dream recall frequency are scarce. The present findings of an online survey indicate that sex role orientation—expressivity/femininity—was related to dream recall frequency but did not fully explain the gender difference in dream recall frequency. Future studies should investigate other variables—in addition to sex role orientation—like verbal memory, recall of emotional experiences, and/or frequency of talking about emotional matters that might play a role in explaining the gender difference in dream recall. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
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)

Dreaming - Vol 20, Iss 3