Factors That Influence Dreams

This topic submitted by Lauren Schone, Carrie Myers, Bong Sok, Lauren Hollinger (emmers94@aol.com, cmyers17@hotmail.com, bong101181@hotmail.com, Hollinle@muohio.edu) at 12:08 am on 10/5/01. Additions were last made on Friday, April 19, 2002. Section: Cummins

Factors That Influence Dreams
Lauren Schone, Bong Sok, Carrie Myers, Lauren Hollinger

I. INTRODUCTION
a. We are interested in finding out if there are certain factors that influence the kind of dreams that college students have. From research that we have found, our hypotheses are that stress will cause worrysome dreams, that the nights after students have been sleep deprived they will dream more, the types of dreams that men and women have will be different, and students with the same majors will have similar dream patterns. In general we think that we will be able to recognize significant dream patterns of Western students.
b. Our group got the idea of doing a lab on dreams from one of the lectures that Chris Myers did. He was talking about statistics, and he showed a table that had information about dreams on it. That was where we got our general idea. We were curious of whether there are factors that are influential upon our dreams, so we decided to test it and find out!
c. At the conclusion of this lab, we hope that we will see some patterns in the types of dreams that students have. We are interested in proving some of the common theories that we have researched. Also, we would be really excited if our hypotheses ended up being correct.
d. This research is interesting because it is a part of everyone's lives and it is a topic that seems to interest everyone. We think that we will be able to help students to understand the patterns in their dreams because we will be gathering a lot of information, analyzing it, and comparing it to the dreams of others. Most people do not sit and analyze their dreams during the day (not busy college students at least), and even they did, they would not compare them to others' dreams enough to see patterns.

II. RELEVANCE OF YOUR RESEARCH QUESTION
a. dream: a sequence of images, etc. passing through a sleeping person's mind.
Sleeping is an essential part of the life of every human being. Humans spend a quarter of the time that they are asleep dreaming (McPhee 1). This is approximately seven and a half years of a human's life! Therefore, dreams too, are an important part of life (McPhee 1).
Dreaming is a process. Humans have four stages of sleep (Dreaming 1). Stage I is a very light sleep, Stage II is a deeper sleep and is also the stage in which dreams begin to brew (Dreaming 1). Stage III is deeper than Stage II and it is also the stage when muscles relax, blood pressure falls, and heart rate slows down (Dreaming 1). Finally, Stage IV, the deepest sleep, is the time when dreams occur (Dreaming 1). Blood pressure and heart rate fluctuate and the brain begins to heat up when rapid eye movement (REM) begins (Dreaming 1). Rapid eye movement is the part of sleep where dreams are most vivid. The first rapid eye movement period only lasts ten minutes and the sleeper will cycle from REM to Stage IV until he or she awakes (Dreaming 1).

Dreams serve a purpose in the brain's functioning. Not only do they help the brain to grow when humans are young, but they also strengthen connections between certain areas of our brains (McPhee 2). When we are deprived of sleep and dreams the nights that follow will be full of many periods of REM sleep (Breger 30). This is why we think that when, for example, Architecture majors pull all nighters they will have a higher number of dreams following that.
We have also researched the difference between the dreams that men and women have. According to our research, women's dreams usually include indoor settings, family, and home. Women's dreams also often have enclosed bodies of water like lakes and pools, while men's dreams are often outdoors and include unfamiliar settings (Wilkerson 1). Men's dreams also have a lot of weapons, tool, cars, roads, sex with unknown and attractive partners, competition, and conflict (Wilkerson 2).

III. MATERIALS AND METHODS
a. Materials: people
paper
statview
internet
microsoft word
weekly Data paper (dream log)

We are going to pass out our weekly Data-sheets to 10-15 students who live in Western Campus every week. We will collect the sheets everyweeks and compare the data to find out the correlation between the stress level and dream type. We are not attempting ot interpreate the dreams of the students, only compare the type to the variables. Once is collected, we will organize the information by the specific categories. Then enter our information into Statview to find if our results are significantly related or if the results are unrelated.
Our lab is applicable to college students because we are concerned with many factors that are associated with dreams, such as sex, stress, etc. This is why we chose to do this lab. It interests us and it interests other people, younger and older.
After doing research we think that the important factors that influence dreams are sex, number of hours slept, and stress level. We have decided that this lab is not to analyze what the dreams of students mean. That is very complicated and we think that it is too subjective to do a scientific experiment on. That is also the reason why we have chosen specific dream themes. We think that it is smarter than letting people just write down their dreams and then having us try to group the dreams together by themes. This way it will be easier to lay out in a table and compare all of our data to find patterns.
b.Our experimental design was sound because it was checked over and reviewed by the professor,the teaching assistant and various students. Our design is also very specific and this makes it easier to annalize our data.
a. All of our information is completely facts given to us by other students. We are going to try to keep the male female ratio fairly equal. The topic and the dream log do not lend the participants to be biased. Through our research, we are attempting to find patterns.
b. We are going to have a variety of people and time periods for participants to fill out the dream logs. This creates a higher chance of getting true results of their dreams. They will not need to fill something out everyday, only when they have a dream.
c. We will be passing out the survey and then collecting them back after a week of dream logs. Once we have recieved the information, we will enter the data into Statview. Statview will help us to perform t-tests to decide if our variables are significantly related to each other or not.
d. We will be asking our classmates to fill out dream surveys for at least a week, and longer if they are willing.
e. Yes, we have included a data sheet.
f. We will be handing out, and collecting surveys on Sundays. The dates of information collecting will be from October 7, 2001 through November 18, 2001.