What are the Most Common Dreams?
|
It is well known that dreams are more negative in content than positive (negative meaning threatening, scary, eerie, etc.). Why this is so is disputable, but evolutionary psychologists tend to believe that most behaviors (yes, thought and dreaming are behaviors) are adapted for because they serve some useful function for survival (at least, until an organism is no longer of reproductive age).
Some people, scientists included, do not embrace the idea that dreaming was an adaptation to better deal with day-time threats, but never-the-less, no one disputes the numbers: There are more failures, misfortunes, and aggressive scenarios in dreams than there are successes and fortunate occurrences. So, what are the most common dream themes from around the world and throughout history? Turns out dream themes are relatively few. When ranking frequencies of these themes, it is important to be clear on what we are asking. There are differences between earliest recalled dreams, most recent dreams, and personally "most-important" or meaningful dreams. Also depends on a persons age and gender, to some extent. |
|
|
To study the question of "what are the most common dreams" researchers can employ a few different information-gathering reports. Participants may be asked to check-off boxes in a Typical Dreams Questionnaire (TDQ), or they be asked to describe recalled dreams in their entirety (and again, these can be further differentiated by whether the reports are collected in a lab setting where the participants are awoken immediately after REM-sleep or if the reports are collected after-the-fact or at home). And, the questions can be divided into categories such as "Earliest Recalled," "Most Recent," "Most Important Dream," etc.
But to give you a snapshot of results (in this case, drawn from a study conducted with university students), the most common TDQ responses for "Have you ever experienced...dream themes," were: 1. Sexual experiences, 2. Being chased or pursued (but not physically harmed), 3. Falling, 4. School, teachers, studying, 5. Being on the verge of falling, 6. Trying again and again to do something, 7. Arriving too late (e.g., missing a train), 8. Being physically attacked, 9. Seeing a person now dead (in real life) as alive (in the dream), 10. Being half awake and paralyzed in bed, 11. Flying or soaring through the air, 12. Sensing, but not seeing, a presence in the room. All in all, 55 TDQ choices were used for this study. The results are very much in line with previous studies which used similar versions of a TDQ, the main difference being that more people seem to be endorsing "Sexual experiences" in dreams as history progresses. This could be an actual change in dream content over the past century, but it could also be that this area has historically been more taboo than admitting (even anonymously) other themes. Could also be that this study was conducted in San Francisco? But the sexual-theme results increasing seems to be a trend when comparing TDQ studies across the past 80 years. |
|
Now, if asked "What themes are most common in your dreams,"falling," "being chased or pursued," "trying again and again to do something," "sexual experiences," "flying," and "teeth falling out" were the most common dreams in the same population as above (and these results are similar to most other studies asking this question). "Being chased or pursued" and "falling" are ALWAYS the most common Earliest Recalled Dreams, followed by "Flying." And if you dig a little deeper, it turns out that many flying dreams occur as an escape method when being chased (to me, this is very mysterious - why would a mammal like a human have flying built-in as an escape response?).
Before this gets too complicated, I'll just add that similar findings result when participants are asked to report their full dreams. This approach is much more time consuming and a little more subjective because it requires "coding" the dream reports - quantifying information from dream-stories so that they can be compared numerically. Still, this latter approach offers rich insight into the details of dreams. |
|
|
If you keep a dream journal (Even if you only enter dreams into it now and then) over a period of years, you would likely see that certain themes (such as being chased or hostility from male dream characters) come up time and time again. Further, if you reserve space in the dream journal to briefly discuss what is going on in your life at the time of each dream, you may gain insight into how daily activity influences dream content.
|