Dreaming and wakefulness relation research

Hello,

I am a last year Psychology student from the University of Klaipeda, Lithuania and I am doing my Bachelor’s dissertation about the relationship between dreaming and wakefulness. I am looking for people who write dream journal entries and have no less than five recent dreams in it (non-lucid!). It would be a great help if you let me use the dreams you have for my research.

If you would like to participate in the research, please write me an email so I can send you two questionnaires about aggression and anxiety. It will only take about 15 minutes to fill in both. You will also have to send me 5 dreams you have written down in last two months. The dreams have to be 50-200 words length and the ones that are usual (not nightmares, precognitive, etc.). Participation is strictly confidential. After completing the research I could send you the results and conclusions.

If you are interested in participating, please write to [email protected], entering ‘Dreaming research’ as the subject and I will send you the questionnaires. After filling them in please send them back.

Your help would be appreciated greatly. Thank You.

Best wishes,
Elizaveta Lemesheva
University of Klaipeda

Hello eleggua :)

I'd love to aid you, will e-mail you in a bit with 5 non-lucid dreams. We don't get many researchers around here, so it's always nice to find these posts :)
Btw, I know that you're asking for recent dream, but in case you haven't heard of it, dreambank.net has a pretty big collection of dreams, and there's some other database with resources for research.

Anyway, looking forward to read the results of your study :)

I am in. I am sending you 5 dreams.

It's nice that dreamers are so enthusiastic about dreaming research. :) I am waiting for more letters. The research will be finished until the end of May.

So I sent my 5 dreams, and I am not sure whether I chose them right. I chose them because they were about 50-200 words in length, which excluded dream fragments and longest dreams, and because I found them interesting, but I could easily have chosen others which could have skewed the set in a different direction.

What is fascinating to me is that I took the anxiety and anger questionnaire's yesterday. Now yesterday was an exceedingly mellow and relaxing day for me, very pleasant. But I then had the following two dreams:

Dream 1: I was being tailgated by a cop on a highway who clearly was hoping to get me a ticket. So that dream was full of anxiety.

Dream 2: I was part of a violent mob trying to overthrow the prince of the place we lived in. The dream was very violent and gory, and filled with anger.

It occurred to me that the fact that one of my dreams was about anxiety and the other one about anger. This followed the very happy pleasant laid back day, during which I just happened to take a questionnaire about anxiety and anger. :)

I still need to copy these two dreams from my notebook to DV, but they were both very interesting. :)

My research is done, so I put here thesis' summary. Always ready to answer questions.

Elizaveta Lemesheva. Men and women dream content relationship with aggression and anxiety. Bachelor‘s thesis in Psychology. Scientific adviser doc. dr. Roma Šimulionienė. University of Klaipeda: Klaipeda, 2013-41 p.

Dreaming research helps to understand functions and causes of dreaming, and consciousness phenomenon generally. Dreaming research also has its practical uses – sleep disorders‘ treatment and dream interpretation for psychotherapy. To succeed in these goals there should exist an accurate dream theory, and one of the important aspects of every dream theory is dreaming relations to waking. Dreaming relations to waking consciousness helps to understand why people dream about certain plots, do dreams have psychological meaning and what dreaming functions are. These relations are explained through continuity of consciousness and continuity of cognition hypotheses. This study aims to explore men and women dream content relationship with daytime aggression and anxiety.

Research was conducted with 28 participants, each of whom reported 5 dreams. 18 women and 12 men participated in the research. Hall/Van de Castle dream content analysis method was used to evaluate dream reports. Aggression Questionnaire and State-Trait Anxiety Questionnaire were also used. Dream reliability was assessed by Experimental Made-Up Dreams Scale, which is being developed by Domhoff.

State anxiety and trait anxiety was significantly correlated to general aggression, anger and hostility. Verbal aggression significantly differs in men and women groups. Women are more verbally aggressive than men.

Significant correlations were found between aggression and unknown dream characters percent; physical aggression and physical aggression in dreams; hostility and dreamer initiated verbal aggression percent. Verbal aggression significantly and negatively correlates with dreamer initiated physical aggression percent.

Trait anxiety negatively correlates with confusion emotion in dreams and positively with apprehension emotion in dreams. Also those who are more anxious are more likely to use verbal aggression in their dreams.

Can you tell more about the Experimental Made Up Dream Scale? I would be very interested to know a bit more about that.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by JoannaB

Can you tell more about the Experimental Made Up Dream Scale? I would be very interested to know a bit more about that.

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It is being created by G. William Domhoff and still not published. Here is Domhoff's website, where you can find a lot of interesting information about dreams and dream content analysis. You can also send an email to Domhoff and get the article about Made-Up Dreams Scale. I have it, but I can't send you it because I am not the author.