Monday, January 18, 2010

Do People Believe That Their Dreams are Important and Meaningful?

In a recent research study, the following question was asked and investigated: Do people believe their dreams are important? As a result, some interesting findings emerged. In the study (King & DeCicco, 2000) the majority of participants stated that they believed that their dreams contained important and relevant information. Furthermore, the most frequent belief was that dreams contain information about relationships.

Given that more than 85% of dreams in general involve characters, and these characters can be linked directly to the dreamer's waking life (DeCicco, unpublished data), the relationship between dreams and waking day relationships appears very important. Furthermore, research on the meaning of dreams has found that waking day relationships was in fact a key meaning reported with dreams (DeCicco & Higgins, 2009). The finding that people believe their dreams to be important and believe them to be mainly about relationships implies that this link is being made, even if somewhat unconsciously. This now clears the path for future research on dreams and relationships to develop more fully and to bring a better understanding of this dimension of dreaming.