by: Lauren Schone, Bong Sok, Carrie Myers, Lauren Hollinger
ABSTRACT
The topic of dreams is on that interests many people because of its illusiveness and mystical quality. Because it is a topic that interests us as well, we have asked the question, “Are there certain factors that cause specific types of dreams?” We are attempting to answer this question by passing out a dream log that inquires about factors like stress, sex, amount of sleep, major, and dorm, while also documenting the types of dreams that first-year Western students have. We are then going to analyze the results on our own and through Statview to see if we can recognize patterns in dreaming. We also plan to examine the validity of researched claims related to factors that affect dreams.
I. INTRODUCTION
We are interested in finding out if there are certain factors that influence the kind of dreams that college students have, particularly those on the Western Campus of Miami University. Our group was influenced by one of the lectures that Chris Myers did in which he showed a chart of different types of dreams and their frequencies. It was a lecture about statistics, but it prompted questions in us about what causes certain dreams, so we decided to test it out on our own. From research that we have analyzed, we have come to several hypotheses. We believe that stress will induce more troubled 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 and stress level will have similar dream patterns. In general we think that we will be able to recognize significant dream patterns in freshman Western students from the data that we collect. At the conclusion of this lab, we hope that we will see some patterns in the types of dreams that students have and that we will be able to recognize what factors will promote or inhibit dream remembrance and the types of dreams that students have. We are interested in proving some of the common theories that we have come across and researched on our own. It would be rather exciting to find significant patterns in students’ dreams and be able to recognize what types of dreams will occur when. 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 other students. 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 in order to see patterns. Hopefully we will come up with some data that will be of interest to professionals and students alike.
II. RELEVANCE
Definition of a dream: a sequence of images, etc. passing through a sleeping person's mind.
It was previously believed that sleep was a passive process, but it has been found that sleep is actively induced by the discovery centers of the brain. This inducement is what prompts dreaming. The earliest of evidence of an interest in dreams is in ancient Egyptian dream books that were recorded around 2000 B.C. Peoples of the past used dreams as a method of foretelling the future and it has been realized that dreams emanate from past experiences, as well as unconscious experiences. It has also been proven that dreams are induced by physical factors as well, even by things like indigestion, smells in your sleeping environment, cats sleeping on your stomach, or alarm clocks!
Two men, Freud and Jung, studied the unconscious in depth, and even focused their research on dreams. Many of the theories that we have about dreams today stem from their ideas. Freud (1856-1939) grew up in Vienna and entered the University of Vienna medical school (one of the few that admitted Jewish men) in 1873 He lacked the funds to venture into the field of neurophysiological research, so he instead decided to study neurology and make money by opening up his own private practice (Sigmund 1). In 1900 Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams and a year later he published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Freud’s ideas, which included “Freudian slips,” the “Oedipus complex,” and ideas about the human sex drive as a shaper of a person’s psychology, proved to be very controversial and his publication of these ideas shocked society in 1905 (Sigmund 2). Society’s disapproval did not deter Freud from his studies and so in 1809 he and seventeen disciples formed the Psychoanalytical Society and Freud began traveling and lecturing on his innovative theories. Freud was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw in 1923, but survived through thirty operations over a sixteen year period and eventually died in 1939 in England, where he had allowed been allowed to seek refuge during Hitler’s reign (Sigmund 2).
Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams gave insight into the function dreams. His main theory was that dreams served as tool for wish-fulfillment, like the desire to do well on an exam or the desire to meet someone of the opposite sex. Freud concurred that two things occurred during sleep: unconscious impulses/wishes, as well as the wish to sleep (Sigmund 2). Freud saw dreams as the “guardians” of sleep, preserving sleep by blocking out intrusive events that would otherwise disturb the slumber. Dreams served this purpose by connecting disturbing external and somatic events with past memories and “robbing” them of their sleep-disturbing qualities (Sigmund 2). Dreams also alter the form of unacceptable memories and present them in a rather benign fashion in order to stop these memories form penetrating sleep. In general, Freud saw dreams as an aid in dealing with stressful events and emotions, presenting them in positive terms that allow us to get a thorough night’s sleep (Sigmund 2).
Jung also contributed to the study of dreams. Jung grew up in Zurich and forged ahead in theories about the autonomous (unconscious) complex and the method of free association (C.G. Jung 1). He worked closely with Freud until they disputed over the ideas of Freud’s psychosexual view of the unconscious. Jung agreed with the biological drives that Freud supported, but he also believed that there was a spiritual aspect to the unconscious that needed to be explored (C.G. Jung 1). Jung was innovative in developing ideas about the self that explored the ideas of archetypes, shadow, animas, and animuses. His theories can be applied to dreams and are even more often used to discuss fairy tales. In Marie-Louise Von Franz’s The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Jungian theories are applied to fairy tales in much the same way as they are in dreams. Jung’s theories of repression and projection and his insights into the human unconscious have been invaluable in even today’s dream studies.
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 itself 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.”. 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, in Stage IV, the deepest sleep and dreams occur, as blood pressure and heart rate fluctuate and the brain begins to heat up when rapid eye movement (REM) begins. 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, plunging into deep sleep more than once a night (Dreaming 1).
III. MATERIALS AND METHODS
Materials:
people
Statview
Internet
Microsoft Word
weekly data sheet (dream log)
This is our survey sheet.
We are going to pass out our weekly data sheets to about 15 first-year students per week who live on Western Campus.We will collect the sheets every week and compile and compare the data to find out the correlation between the stress level and dream type. We will also pay attention to the number of hours slept per night, the number of dreams per night, as well as the major, residence, and sex of the surveyed individual. We are not attempting to interpret the dreams of the students, only comparing the type of dream to the variables. Once the data is all collected, we will organize the information by the specific categories. We plan on viewing the data separately in three categories. We will first look at it by sex, next by dorm, and finally by major, to see if there are patterns within these categories. We will then enter our information into Statview to find if our results are significantly related or if the results are unrelated by performing t-tests and analyzing the graphs that we create.
Our lab is applicable to college students because we are concerned with many factors that are associated with college students, 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 the purpose of this lab is not to analyze what the dreams of students mean because that is very complicated and we think that it is too subjective to do a scientific experiment that would interpret dreams. That is also why we have chosen specific dream themes. We think that it will be useful for data purposes to have students categorize their dreams, rather than letting them just write down their dreams and trying to group them ourselves. That would be much too complicated.
Our experimental design is sound because it was checked over and reviewed by the professor, the teaching assistant, and various students. Our design is also very specific and organized and will allow for an easier interpretation of the data. All of our information is facts given to us by other students. We are going to try to keep the male to female ratio fairly equal, although males are rather outnumbered on Western. The topic of dreams and the dream log itself do not lend the participants to be biased and we are merely observing patterns in data so there is no reason to “fudge” results because neither the participants nor the members of our group really have any specific idea of what we will find.
We are going to have a many people participate throughout our experiment and we are limiting the time periods for participants to fill out the dream logs. Hopefully, this will create a higher chance of getting truer results of their dreams. Rather than have them fill out a survey for a month, we are doing it weekly so that participants will not ignore the survey or make up dreams. We have specified on the survey that if the participant does not remember their dreams they simply have to mark “none remembered.” We realize that not everyone remembers their dreams and that distractions, like alarm clocks, can cause people to lose their dreams. We will conduct these surveys from October 7, 2001 until November 18, 2001, during which time our group will be filling out the surveys every week and handing out the surveys and collecting them on a weekly basis.
We are also going to involve our 8:00 Natural Systems Class in our experiment. We hope to teach them a little bit about the functions and history of dreams in a power point presentation. They will also be responsible for carrying out our dream survey for a week. Each member of the class will be required to do this. Also, as an interesting experiment, we plan on having our class take a nap.It is, after all, an 8:00 class and so we figure that our class would be more than willing to help us with this experiment. It should not be too hard to fall back asleep since they will have just woken up and it is likely that they will fall into REM sleep during this time. We will have them bring sleeping bags and pillows and sleep for a time period of about 45 minutes. We would like to see if they have dreams and what they dream about. We will wake them slowly so that they are more likely to remember their dreams. Hopefully we will have enough input from them that we can facilitate a discussion about the dreams, asking the students questions about their stress level and amount of sleep the night before.
Breger, Louis; Hunter, Ian; and Lane, Ron W. Psychological Issues: The Effect of Stress on Dreams. International Universities Press: New York, 1971.
C.G. Jung: A Brief Biography and Bibliography. Jung Bio. 18 October 2001.http://www.usd.edu/~tgannon/jungbio.html.
Delaney, Gayle. In Your Dreams. Harper: San Francisco, 1997.
Doing Research Projects on Dream Content. Dreams. 12 September 2001. http://psych.ucsc.edu/dreams/projects.html.
McPhee, Charles. Ask the Dream Doctor. Dream Doctor. 12 September 2001. http://www.dreamdoctor.com/faq.shtml.
Neuroscience for Kids. 4 October 2001. http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/neurok.html.
Sigmund Freud.A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries. 18 October 2001. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhfreu.html.
The Dreaming Process. Dreams. 12 September 2001. http://library.thinkquest.org/11130/data/sleep/process.html.
Wilkerson, Richard. Questions & Answers: Dreams Department. Self-help Magazine. 2001. Pioneer Development Resources. 2 October 2001. http://www.shpm.com/ga/gadream/gadream11.html.
Wilkerson, Richard. Science Projects on Dreams. Science Projects- Educational Material from Association for Study of Dreams. 2 October 2001. http://www.asdreams.org/subidxeduscienceprojects.htm.
Winget, Carolyn and Kramer, Milton. Dimensions of Dreams. University Presses of Florida: Florida, 1979.
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