Abstract
Manifest dream content refers to the descriptive nature of people’s dreams. The present investigation was concerned with the relationship between manifest dream content and gender, personality, and stress. For this purpose, an assessment instrument was developed to measure a variety of different types of manifest dream content, the Manifest Dream Scale (MDS). Factor analysis indicated that the items on the Manifest Dream Scale clustered into five separate groups: (a) positive social activity, (b) undesirable negative experience, (c) death, injury, and natural events, (d) entertainment and recreation, and (e) mundane activities. Gender was found to be related to some but not all of the manifest dream categories. A more consistent pattern of relationships was found between manifest dream content and (a) instrumental and expressive personality attributes, and (b) gender role tendencies. In addition, a final set of results indicated that a recent history of stressful life experiences produced an impact on the manifest content of women’s and men’s dreams.
Dreams have fascinated psychologists for a number of decades. Dreaming itself refers to the psychological processes that correspond to the neurophysiological activity of the sleeping nervous system (Cohen, 1976). Prior to the advent of contemporary sleep research, the most common explanation of dreaming was Freud’s (1965). According to Freud, dreams serve as a type of safety valve through which people find psychological release for unacceptable wishes and impulses. In addition, Freud argued that dream content is often forgotten because the content is so frightening and unacceptable that people actively repress their memory.
An alternative perspective has begun to emerge in recent years (Cohen, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1973a, 1973b, 1974a, 1975b). According to this approach, dream content reflects the influence of presleep events in a direct and continuous manner. As such, this theory contends that there should be a considerable degree of correspondence between dream content and aspects of people’s personality and their individual life style. The results of several studies are consistent with Cohen’s (1976) continuity theory of dreams. In two of these investigations, presleep mood was found to correlate significantly with the affective quality of dreams (Cohen, 1974b; Cohen and Cox, 1975). Another study dealing with “sex-role orientation” and dream content was also interpreted as supportive of Cohen’s continuity theory of dreaming (Cohen, 1973b). In this study, people who described themselves in terms of gender-related personality attributes reported similar themes in their manifest dream content.
The purpose of the present investigation was to further examine the notion that dreams directly reflect the nature of people’s personality and their current lifestyle concerns. To accomplish this goal, dreams were content analyzed to identify the range and variety of manifest dream themes characterizing them. Content categories were then identified through the use of factor analyses, and subscales were constructed on the basis of the factor loadings. Next, the resulting dream categories were correlated with (a) a measure of stressful life experiences, the Angry Life Experiences Scale (ALES; Snell, Belk, Gum, Shuck, and Mosley, 1988), (b) a measure of instrumental and expressive personality attributes, the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ; Spence, Helmreich, and Holohan, 1979; Spence, Helmreich and Stapp, 1975), and (c) a measure of global masculinity and global femininity, the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ; Spence and Helmreich, 1978). It was anticipated that these stress and personality tendencies would be directly reflected in the manifest dream content of women and men (cf. Hall, 1966, 1984).
Portions of these data were presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Study of Mental Imagery, New Haven, CT, June 1988. Gratitude is extended to David Cohen for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. Request for reprints and copies of the MDS should be sent to William E. Snell, Jr., Department of Psychology, Southeast Missouri State University, Cape Girardeau, MO 63701
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Snell, W.E., Gum, S., Shuck, R.L., Mosley, J.A. (1989). Measuring Manifest Dream Content. In: Shorr, J.E., Robin, P., Connella, J.A., Wolpin, M. (eds) Imagery. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0876-6_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0876-6_17
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