Chased by your
dreams
We walk
naked, fly, have sex and lose our teeth. Why? New studies unravel our reveries.
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.
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.