Your comment reminds me of a key idea from one of my graduate school mentors, Peter Homans. In studying Freud, Jung, and the origins of modern psychology, Homans said that people who were comfortable in the common culture (e.g., their family, community, social norms) usually did not seek out psychological insights. On the other hand, people who feel marginal in the common culture tend to be more open to psychological perspectives. Homans said there is a tension between the common culture and analytic access, which may account for why people who are religiously/politically conservative tend not to be interested in dreams, while progressives and liberals take more notice of dreams. Having said that, I would not endorse the idea that “dreams are often a sign of emotional problems.” People with emotional problems may express them in their dreams, but dreams themselves are not necessarily symptomatic or pathological.

Those are two good possibilities. In the 2007/2008 study I sided with the former: the close connection between religious piety and political conservatism suggested that dreams would not be of much interest to people who are highly committed to traditional belief systems. Your latter explanation is more speculative but may have merit. At the extremes, you have mystics like Ramakrishna for whom dreaming diminishes in importance because their waking visions are so all-consuming. For ordinary American Christians, maybe prayer serves some kind of dreaming function?

The survey didn’t gather quite that much detail. There were 131 Jewish participants, 49 female and 82 male, which is enough to warrant further study. Everyone else, whether Muslim, Hindu, or atheist, was lumped into the “other/none” category on this question. However, people’s answers to other questions about religion–how often they attend worship services, whether they consider themselves more spiritual than religious”–allow different angles on this general topic. I’ll take a look at the patterns for the Jewish participants and post the results later this week.