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What do our dreams mean?
Posted on Monday, September 01, 2008 (CDT) by Thoth
 What did you dream about last night? Were you chased by some unseen phantom through dark woods; did you get intimate with a Hollywood film star; or were you simply doing some shopping in your local supermarket? According to new research that has analysed more than 22,000 dreams, you're most likely to have dreamt the latter.
The dreams, some dating back to the late 19th century, are stored on the Dreambank at the University of California. The facility, which relies on people phoning the university to report their dreams, is giving researchers new insights into the nature and content of dreams.
The research suggests claims that dreams are top heavy with sex and religion might be wrong, and that most - as many as eight out of ten - are about mundane everyday concerns and interests such as parents, friends, driving, shopping and sport. Men might think about sex every seven seconds, it seems, but don't dream about it anywhere near as much.
Dreams have
long been a source of fascination because of their surreal content, our
lack of control over them, and the absence of a universally accepted
explanation for exactly what they are and whether or not they have any
purpose.Although there is no consensus on the purpose, if any, of
dreams, there are many theories. One suggests that dreams are random
images created by the brain as it reworks the previous day's events,
while another proposes that dreaming is simply the brain keeping itself
occupied with home-made B movies while the body sleeps.
Yet another theory is that
they are part of a survival strategy that evolved in early Man to help
him to learn while he slept so he could recognise and deal with threats
in a hostile world. Others suggest that dreams have a kind of
mulling-over effect, helping to solve problems that cannot be dealt
with while awake, or that they are part of the process of memorising
the previous day's events, or that they can somehow foretell the future.
Do dreams have a function?
Although there are many of
these theories, they broadly split into two camps: those that suggest a
function for dreams; and those that propose they have no purpose. “The
fact that we remember so few of our dreams, a few per cent at best,
argues against any function for dreams. If they are so important, why
don't we remember more of them? If dreams are important, why aren't the
recallers of them better off in some way?” says Dr Bill Domhoff, of the
University of California, Santa Cruz, home of the Dreambank. “We are
thinking creatures because thinking is a valuable adaptation, but that
doesn't mean that all forms of thinking have a function. Dreams at this
moment in the collective findings of dream researchers seem to be a
throwaway production, an offhand story to while the night away.''
Dr Domhoff and his
colleagues have used new search tools to investigate the content of the
individual dreams in the Dreambank, a database whose contributors range
from scientists and academics to teenagers, middle-aged women and
pensioners. It includes 86 dreams from a physiology graduate student at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology that date back to 1897, and 900
dreams from a psychologist recorded between 1913 and 1965. When the
psychologists searched the bank for keywords, they found that
references to sexual intercourse and religion were relatively rare.
Sexual intercourse references were 2 per cent for men and 0.4 per cent
for women. Only 3.3 per cent of the dream reports mentioned churches,
cathedrals, temples and chapels, and only 0.8 per cent referredto
specific religions or denominations.
“The findings from this
search raise the general question: why is thinking about sexuality more
pervasive in waking thought than it appears to be in dreaming?” say the
researchers. “Although dreams and sexuality are often closely related
in popular culture, perhaps in part due to Freud's theory concerning
the hidden sexual meanings said to be present in most dreams, studies
suggest that there is little explicit sexual content in dreams.''
The findings also raise
questions about what people dream about. According to the research, as
many as 75 to 80 per cent of dreams deal with everyday personal
concerns and interests. A dream series from one man that they analysed
in detail showed that his mother and father appeared in 23.9 per cent
of dream reports, friends in 53.9 per cent, driving 24.5 per cent,
outdoor activities 17 per cent, eating 13.7per cent and sport 6.1 per
cent.
The theory that dreams are
not full of magical worlds and bizarre fantasies but are about events
in our day-to-day lives has been bolstered by other research. For
example, researchers at the University of Florence found that musicians
dream of music more than twice as often as non-musicians. Other
research has shown that the number of women dreaming about work has
increased at the same time as the proportion of women in the workforce
has risen.
An evolutionary purpose
But although the everyday
content seems to support the idea that dreams have no function, other
researchers have shown otherwise. Researchers at the University of
Turku in Finland have found support for an evolutionary purpose of
dreams. When they analysed nearly 600 dreams they found that two thirds
contained at least one threat, and that more than 60 per cent of these
threats were likely to be experienced in real life.
The idea is that during
dreaming the brain builds up a model of the world, taking into account
what happened in the real world so that strategies can be planned and
problems solved.
“The hypothesis is that the
biological function of dreaming is to simulate threatening events and
to rehearse threat perception and threat avoidance,'' says Dr Antti
Revonsuo, a psychologist at the University of Turku. “In the ancestral
environment human life was short and full of threats. A
dream-production mechanism that tends to select threatening waking
events and simulate them over and over again would have been valuable
for the development of threat-avoiding skills.'
An aid to daytime learning?
Research at Harvard
University has found support for another idea, that sleeping and
dreaming boost daytime learning. Researchers found that when they woke
people as soon as they had fallen asleep and then analysed the content
of their dreams that the subjects were already processing images from a
computer game that they had been playing beforehand. That, say the
researchers, suggests nocturnal brain processing was helping them to
play the game better.
Jim Horne, the director of
the Sleep Research Centre at Loughborough University and author of
Sleepfaring, is sceptical about the value of analysing the dreams of
others. “People who obsessively record their dreams probably are not
normal dreamers. Most normal dreamers don't remember dreams because
they are junk basically. Most dreams last for 20 minutes or longer, so
recall is often of the distorted end of the dream,'' he says.
The idea that dreams have
an essential function is further undermined, he adds, by research
showing that people taking some drugs, including certain
antidepressants, do not dream at all for months. Dreaming, he suggests,
is a consequence of the brain not wanting to be switched off for eight
hours and its needs to be stimulated. The job of dreams, it seems, may
be to keep the brain entertained and the body asleep. “They are the
cinema of the mind where the brain creates junk B movies that are
entertaining, but which mean little and arebest forgotten.”
Factbox: What do our dreams mean?
The stuff of nightmares
According to the dream
specialist Dr Patricia Garfield, a past president of the Association
for the Study of Dreams, there are 12 basic nightmares that are
universal, including being chased or being naked in public, as well as
drowning, falling or being menaced by the dead.
Personality and dreams
People with conservative
personalities dream more about being chased, fall from high buildings
with greater frequency, and are prone to themes of discontent and
unhappiness. They also have far fewer sexual dreams, according to
research by the Santa Clara University, California.
Be careful what you read
People who are attracted to
fantasy novels are more prone to nightmares, while children who read
scary books are three times as likely to have scary dreams, according
to research at Swansea University. It also shows that the dreams of
those who prefer romantic novels are more emotionally intense.
Flying high
Nearly one person in 12 has
had a recent dream about flying, according to a study at Mannheim
University in Germany. “The increase in people who report flying dreams
might reflect the increasing amount of air travel,'' they say.
Don't watch the news
Dream topics change in
response to what we worry about. According to dreams filed at the World
Dream Bank, a library of 1,500 dream texts and images
(www.worlddreambank.org), more people seem to be dreaming about climate
change, while a study at Tufts University in Boston disclosed that the
dreams of dream diarists immediately after the 9/11 attacks were
different from those just before.
Dreams in numbers
-
5-30 minutes the average length of a dream
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Every 90min how often we dream at night
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33% of dreams convey misfortune
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25% of dreams take place in a known location
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50% of social interactions in dreams are aggressive, usually towards the dreamer
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95% to 99% the proportion of dreams that we forget
Copyright: Times Online
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