Are some waking-life experiences more likely than others to be reflected in our everyday dreams?

Indeed there are. Studies have found that people rarely dream of cognitively focused activities such as reading, writing, and computer-use, even if they engage in them for significantly long periods of time during the day. Similarly, some day-to-day activities and concerns such as commuting to work, eating, and financial worries rarely appear in dreams whereas the frequency of occurrence in dreams of social and interpersonal situations is not only very high, but also disproportional to the time spent thinking about such situations during wakefulness. There is also evidence showing that waking-life thoughts can have a greater impact on dream content than corresponding physical waking-life events. For example, thinking and fantasizing about sexual activities is more strongly related to the occurrence of erotic dreams than are actual waking-life experiences with sexual activities. Thus, dream content may be more continuous with waking-life thoughts than with actual waking-life events.

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