A new survey reveals the wide range of attitudes that contemporary Americans hold towards dreaming.
It might seem that in dreams you enter a purely subjective realm, a world of total solipsism in which nothing exists but the individual self. Yet the more we learn about dreaming, the more we realize how deeply it is shaped by cultural forces and collective realities.
We live, waking and dreaming, within a dynamic cultural matrix of beliefs, ideas, symbols, and values. Out of this matrix we form attitudes that help us make sense of the world and our experiences within it. Cultural attitudes can have a huge impact on people’s experiences with dreaming, influencing how often people remember their dreams, how often they share their dreams with other people, and what kinds of meanings they look for in their dreams.
To explore the nature of these cultural factors at a large scale, I commissioned YouGov, a professional opinion research company, to conduct an online survey. A total of 5,255 American adults participated in the survey, and they were asked a standard set of demographic questions (gender, age, race/ethnicity, education, etc.) along with several other questions targeted to my research interests, including religious affiliation, political ideology, and social policies about climate change and immigration. In addition to these questions, participants were asked about their sleep quality, dream recall, frequency of sharing dreams with others, and their agreement with a set of six statements about dreaming:
- Some dreams are caused by powers outside the human mind.
- Dreams are a good way of learning about my true feelings.
- Dreams are random nonsense from the brain.
- Dream can anticipate things that happen in the future.
- I am too busy in waking life to pay attention to my dreams.
- I get bored listening to other people talk about their dreams.
For each statement, the participants were asked if they strongly agreed, somewhat agreed, neither agreed nor disagreed, somewhat disagreed, or strongly disagreed.
Michael Schredl and I are currently working on an article that analyzes people’s responses to the six attitudes statements in relation to gender, age, race/ethnicity, education, and religious affiliation. Michael is a researcher at the sleep laboratory of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, and he has done lots of previous research on people’s attitudes towards dreams. We are planning to submit the article soon to the International Journal for Dream Research.
A second article will follow, focusing on people’s responses to the attitudes statements in relation to political variables (ideology, beliefs about immigration and climate change). A third article may focus on the sleep question (“How many nights in an average week do you experience insomnia or have trouble sleeping?”) in relation to the other demographic variables.
The Sleep and Dream Database currently has available for public study the survey responses for several questions: gender, age, age group D (18-34-35-54, 55 and older), US region F (West, South, Northeast, Midwest), dream recall, and the statement “Some dreams are caused by powers outside the human mind.” All survey responses will be made available once the initial analyses are finished.
If you have any hypotheses about what the survey results will show, please let me know!
