Dreams

I don’t know what your particular recurrent dream may signify, but several clinical dream theorists believe that recurrent dreams are related to unresolved life difficulties and that the cessation of a recurring dream indicates that the difficulty has been dealt with successfully. Consistent with these ideas, researchers have shown that the occurrence of recurrent dreams during adulthood is associated with stressors and lowered levels of psychological well-being and that the elimination of a previously recurrent dream is correlated with improved well-being. Thus, changes from recurrent to progressive dream patterns may be important indicators of how well people are adapting to life circumstances.

60% to 75% of adults report having had one or more recurrent dreams at some point in their lives.  In some cases, recurrent dreams which emerge during childhood may persist into adulthood. There is also some evidence to indicate that recurrent dreams are more prevalent in women than they are in men.

In terms of dream content, 60% to 85% of recurrent dreams are described as being unpleasant.  Dream content is described as being pleasant in approximately 10% of recurrent dreams, while the rest are rated as being either neutral or containing a mixture of both positive and negative emotions. .  Because positive recurrent dreams occur infrequently, their association to measures of well-being has not been investigated.  Thus, we do not know if people who report positive recurrent dreams also show a relative deficit on measures of well-being.  Similarly, we do not know whether the maintained cessation of pleasant recurrent dreams is correlated with positive, negative, or no changes in well-being.

Themes in which the dreamer is in danger (e.g., threatened with injury, death, or chased) have been found to characterize approximately 40% of recurrent dreams from adulthood and between 65% and 90% of recurrent dreams recalled by adults from their childhood. Using the same broad content category, we showed that almost 80% of children’s recurrent dreams contain themes in which the dreamer was in danger. In a majority of these cases, the dreamer is often fleeing, attempting to hide, or helplessly watching events unfold.

Whereas threatening agents in adult recurrent dreams are typically human characters, children’s recurrent dreams are much more likely to contain monsters, wild animals, witches, zombies and other types of ghoulish creatures.

Several thematic content categories reported by adult are noticeably absent from children’s recurrent dreams. These included themes involving problems with house maintenance (e.g., the dreamer becomes overwhelmed by an inordinate number of household chores or discovers that the house is falling apart or in ruins), loosing one’s teeth, and being unable to find a private toilet.

At the most general level, findings based on systematic content research (including several studies by our group) suggest that most dreams can be understood as simulations that enact the person’s main conceptions and concerns, including emotionally salient and interpersonal experiences. The Continuity Hypothesis of dreaming—one of the most widely studied models of dreaming—posits that dream content is psychologically meaningful in that it reflects the dreamer's current thoughts, concerns and salient experiences. The idea that dreams are generally continuous with these waking dimensions and drawn from many of the same psychological schemata that govern waking thought and behaviour also lies at the heart of many contemporary theories of dream function. This is true, for instance, for theories suggesting that dreaming plays a role in emotional regulation, that they serve to simulate waking reality, or that dreams reflect offline processing of recent events to help learning and guide future behaviour.

Findings from various studies are consistent with the view that dreams tend to reflect the contents of waking thoughts and concerns. For example, research has shown that the occurrence of unpleasant dreams (e.g., bad dreams and nightmares) in otherwise healthy adults is related to their levels of well-being, that dream content is reactive to the experience of naturalistic and experimental stressors, that some personality traits are correlated to specific dream content, that the topographical and sensory characteristics of dreams recalled by the congenitally blind are consistent with how they experience the world in waking-life, and that the social networks in dreams — that is, the pattern of direct and indirect relationships among the characters — have the same properties as the dreamer’s real life social networks. Furthermore, the fact that developmental contents of dreaming in children follow their developmental patterns in waking cognitive processes is also consistent with the view that dream and waking thought contents are continuous.

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.

Although considerable research supports the continuity model of dreaming, central questions regarding the nature and extent of continuity between dreaming and wakefulness remain unanswered. For instance, it is still unclear what particular dimensions of waking life (e.g., physical activities, cognitions, emotions) are most robustly associated to specific dream content. Similarly, relatively little is known about the extent to which people's dreams are reactive to individual differences in waking state and trait variables (e.g., daily stressors, personality, psychological well-being).  And, of course, there are many other models of how dream content relates to waking-life dimensions, including in terms of various kinds of learning, emotional regulation, how people react to different kinds of trauma, and so on.

Questionnaire studies indicate that approximately 80% of adults answer positively to the question “Have you ever dreamed of sexual experiences?” with men reporting sexual dreams more often than women. The normative data from the classic HVDC studies indicates that 12% of men’ dreams and 4% of women’s dreams contained sexual content, including having or attempting intercourse, petting, kissing, sexual overtures and fantasies.

However, one study by our group of over 3500 dream reports found no gender differences, with approximately 8% of dream reports from both men and women containing sexually-related activity. The differences with the HVDC data may be partially due to sample composition (college students versus student and non-student adults).

Alternatively, it is also possible that women actually experience more sexual dreams now than they did 40 years ago, or that they now feel more comfortable reporting such dreams due to changing social roles and attitudes, or both.

While dreams often contain autobiographical memories (i.e., personal representations of times, places, associated emotions and other contextual knowledge) relatively few dream reports contain complete episodic memories (i.e., memories of personally lived experiences that reproduce places, actions and characters). However, people's experiences from the previous day (commonly known as day residues) remain the most frequent time referent depicted in dreams and occur in approximately half of all dream reports.

Now, getting to your question, studies on the temporal relationship between daily events and their incorporation into dreams have also revealed a temporal pattern known as the ‘dream-lag effect.’ This term refers to the high level of incorporation of events experienced 5 to 7 days prior to the dream. Hence, the temporal relationship between daily experiences and their subsequent incorporation in dreams can be defined by the day-residue effect (incorporation of material from the day immediately preceding the dream), as well as the dream-lag effect (incorporation into dreams of daytime experiences having occurred approximately one week prior to the dream).  There exist other, more complex, temporal effects on dream content. 

Although there were indications in early laboratory studies that dreaming occurs almost exclusively in REM sleep and that there were difference in the content of REM and NREM reports, many later studies suggest that the differences in recall are not black and white, especially late in the sleep period, and that some but not all of the content differences disappear when there is a control for word length (i.e., the number of words used to describe a given dream). Still, most studies conclude that dreams are more frequent and longer during REM periods and that many NREM reports seem to be “thoughts,” not dreams. In fact, NREM reports are more often a continuation of waking thoughts and memories, whereas there are few episodic memories in REM or home dream reports.