Even dreaming is not much of an escape for conservatives these days. People who score highly for conservative personality traits dream more about being chased or falling from high buildings, and are more prone to reveries filled with unhappiness, according to new research They also dream more often than others about being famous and have far fewer sexual dreams.
“This paints a picture, clinically, of individuals with frail ego integrity, who try unconsciously to put sexuality at a distance,” says Dr Jerry Kroth, who led the study, which he will present next week at a gathering of more than 200 dream experts from around the world. “Being famous in your dreams is a sign of yearning for recognition, acceptance and accolades. Not a pretty picture, the unconscious of the conservative.”
But it’s not just the conservative-minded who have their own dream profiles. Men and women have different dreams, as do the tall and the short, rich and poor, thin and fat, and Christians and non-Christians. Kroth, a psychologist at Santa Clara University, will be at the California Dreaming Conference, which showcases 100 research projects on subjects as diverse as the dreams of anorexics, of civilians in wartime Britain and of Japanese shoppers, and on whether dreams can predict future events.
One fundamental question will recur at the conference: why do we dream? Throughout history, humankind has been fascinated by dreams, not just because of their surreal content but also because they are out of our control. Whatever we mean to dream about before we fall asleep almost never develops into a dream. And no one knows what purpose, if any, dreams have. Are they random cerebral junk, glimpses of the past or future, or the brain doing its filing? A dominant theory at the conference is that dreams are random, chaotic images that emerge as the offline brain goes through its housekeeping, or reworks the previous day’s events. One version of this argument suggests that dreams are part of the memory process: the brain goes through the day’s events and stores and cross-references them in different areas. Support for this comes from evidence that dreams are most often remembered when they occur in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when the brain is just as active as when we are awake. There is additional evidence that REM sleep is involved in memory formation.
Dreams may also act as a kind of reappraisal exercise, with the brain reworking big issues of the day to search for better solutions. That, say proponents, may explain why problems are best slept on. A new theory at the conference refines this idea to suggest that dreams are a kind of testbed for the mind. Dr Richard Coutts, an independent researcher, says: “This theory describes how the mind makes modifications to the way it perceives information and tests these with dreams before implementing them. If the modifications perform well, they are adopted. Otherwise they’re either dismissed or refined.” Research on the content of dreams seems to back that up because the common themes are most important during our waking hours: work, sex, money, holidays, family, illness and death.
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Whatever their purpose, research at the University of Wales, Swansea, shows that negative dreams are far more common than positive ones. Dr Mark Blagrove, a reader in psychology there, who is presenting a paper on personality at the conference, says: “Most people have more negative than positive dreams. Our research showed that happy people had more positive dreams than the unhappy. But even happy people have more negative dreams than positive ones.”
Nightmares are a particular type of negative dream and some research suggests that they are caused by negative waking emotions, including stress, anxiety, fear and sadness, or traumatic experiences. Personality may be involved, too: research at Swansea suggests that people who are attracted to fantasy novels are more prone to nightmares; children who read scary books are three times as likely to have scary dreams; and the dreams of those who prefer romantic novels are more emotionally intense.
Although researchers caution that dream interpretations are specific to the individual, there are common themes. Falling in a dream can be a sign of insecurity; being chased can symbolise running away from a problem; losing teeth may reflect concerns about appearance. Running and getting nowhere is a sign of overwork, while flying is a symbol of being in control. Being naked suggests a desire to communicate, as taking off clothes is akin to removing barriers.
But while some dreams are complex metaphors, others are more obvious, like this election-time dream from an 18-year-old girl interviewee: “I was in my room watching the news on the election and eating chips, and George W. Bush came into my room and stole my chips.”
Are you a psychic dreamer?
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Do you own a cat, suffer from back pain, or have a scar on your knee? If you answer yes to all three, you probably believe that your dreams predict the future, and you also believe in the paranormal. The questions were constructed by psychologists to test for differences between people who believe that their dreams foretell events and those who don’t.
“We asked hundreds of people these questions, which appear objective; in fact, they test whether people just want to agree with you. So they count an old scar on the leg as being on the knee,” says Dr Mark Blagrove of the University of Wales, Swansea. “The more ‘yes’ answers people gave, the more likely they were to believe that their dreams foretell the future and are paranormal.”
He says that such people are more accommodating types who see links between what happens in their dreams and future events. In that way, coincidences become predictions.
His ‘n’ hers
Research shows that men and women have different types of dreams:
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Women’s dreams ...