Dream Study Intro -
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Dream recall which is not immediately reported after controlled laboratory awakenings is considered to be invalid by some dream researchers, representing a biased sample likely to fall prey to selective memory (Foulkes, 1979; Mealey, 2000). Recall of dreams in the sleep laboratory is often considered to produce valid observations; however, participants studied under laboratory conditions are usually not trained in self-observation and are no less likely than other populations to succumb to demand characteristics of the experiment or other report biasing (i.e., omitting or changing private details) (Nielsen & Stenstrom, 2005).
No one method of collecting dream reports is the “right” approach. Each collection technique has its advantages and shortcomings: laboratory awakenings after each REM cycle may help researchers gain insight into how dreams are recalled immediately upon dream completion and how dreams change across the night, but this approach is extremely resource consuming; scrutinizing home-journaling of dreams is less costly but may not be as disciplined. A third, rapid approach to collecting dream material is to have participants describe the Most Recent Dream (MRD) they can recall. Although the MRD approach is not representative of all dream collection techniques, it is likely to depict those dreams and dream elements which are particularly salient and “stick” to waking consciousness. The Threat Simulation Theory (TST) for the function of dreaming was tested with MRD’s collected from 208 South African participants living in a high crime area in South Africa and116 Welsh participants living in a low crime area, to test the tenant that real threats in a person’s environment should activate the dream-threat system, resulting in a higher incidence of threats in dreams (Malcolm-Smith, Solms, Turnbull, & Tredoux, 2008). The study’s authors reported their results to be contradictory to what the TST would predict, with the South Africans having significantly less threats in their MRD’s than did the Welsh participants, and overall less than 20% of dreams depicted any realistic survival threats to well-being, and of those which did, only 5% included escape from the dream threats. The MRD study testing the TST likely found such a small percentage of threats in the sample populations for several reasons. First, the narrow range of threats counted was not representative of the full range of threats which would endanger the reproductive strength of the dreamer had such an event occurred in real life, such as loss or serious insult to a significant other, damage or loss to personal property or resources or social status. Also, living in a high-crime area, such as was the case for the South African sample population, may not be as strong of a trigger to fully activate the dream threat system, as would be, say, living in a war zone. Regarding the finding that the dream threats were not escaped from, the TST does not postulate that dream threats are successfully ended, only that a fight or flight type of response is triggered. |