Domhoff, G.W. (1996). Finding meaning in dreams. A quantitative approach. r.1 The scientific study of dream content.pdf

Finding Meaning in Dreams: Chapter 1

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Use these links to quickly navigate through the book:

¤ Introduction

¤ Chapter 1: The Scientific Study of Dream Content

¤ Chapter 2: The Hall/Van De Castle System

¤ Chapter 3: The Quality of the Data

¤ Chapter 4: Normative Findings

¤ Chapter 5: Age Differences in Dream Reports

¤ Chapter 6: Cross-Cultural Studies of Dream Content

¤ Chapter 7: Consistency and Change in Long Dream Series

¤ Chapter 8: The Continuity Between Dreams and Waking Life

¤ Chapter 9: The Repetition Dimension

¤ References

Chapter 1: The Scientific Study of Dream Content

Introduction

The purpose of this book is to search for meaning in dreams through the quantitative study of

dream content. It will do so in three senses of that elusive term. First, it will demonstrate an internal

coherence or regularity in the dreams of specific groups, such as men, children, or members of

hunting and gathering societies. Second, it will show there is consistency in what individuals dream

about from year to year and even over decades. Third, it will reveal correspondences between dream

content and waking life; more specifically, it will show a direct continuity between dream concerns

and waking concerns.

The book will attempt to realize its purpose through the version of content analysis created by

Calvin S. Hall and Robert L. Van de Castle (1966) on the basis of earlier work by Hall (1947, 1951,

1953a) and his students (e.g., Polster, 1951; Reis, 1951; Meer, 1955; Cook, 1956; Paolino, 1964).

The Hall/Van de Castle coding system was constructed gradually through the empirical study of

thousands of dream reports collected from college students in the 1940s and 1950s. It is the most

comprehensive and detailed system for the study of dream content developed to date. Given the

explicit coding rules developed by Hall and Van de Castle, all of which will be presented in this

book, their categories can be used by any investigator willing to take the time to learn the system.

The Hall/Van de Castle system may be unique among methods of dream analysis in that it relies

entirely on the dream reports themselves in order to determine whether or not there is meaning in

dreams. It does not use free associations, amplifications, biographical information, or any other

information provided by the dreamer. Nor does it draw upon metaphoric, linguistic, or literary

methods of interpretation. The Hall/Van de Castle system makes comparisons of dream reports in

three different ways to search for dream meaning. First, it compares new dream reports with

normative information on American college students and other population groups. Second, it

compares one dream or type of dream within an individual dream series with other dreams in the

series. Third, it compares reports of specific types of dreams collected from many people, such as

dreams of flying or of appearing partially clad in public, with each other and with the norms for

dreams in general.

The quantitative study of dream content begins with the careful formulation of categories to

encompass the many different elements appearing in dreams. In the case of the Hall/Van de Castle

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system, these categories include characters, social interactions, settings, the activities engaged in

by the dreamer and other dream characters, and a wide range of objects. There are also coding

categories for emotions, temporal references, successes and failures, good fortunes and misfortunes,

and many other aspects of dream content. Categories can be expanded or combined to fit the needs

of specific research questions, and new categories can be created.

As will be shown, the Hall/Van de Castle system has a number of advantages over other coding

systems, and in fact encompasses most other systems. For one thing, it is possible to achieve high

intercoder reliability. For another, its categories have been shown to be psychologi-cally relevant in

terms of the waking concerns of those who have contributed dream reports. Furthermore, its

normative findings on the dream reports of American college students, replicated several times,

provide a comparison point for studies of dream content all over the world. It therefore has been used

by investigators in many different countries, including India and Japan, for a wide range of projects.

This widespread use makes it possible for findings to be cumulative and therefore to serve as a

reference point for new studies.

Studies of over 10,000 dream reports using the Hall/Van de Castle system have yielded consistent

developmental, gender, and cross-cultural differences as well as a core of findings stable across

gender lines and cultural boundaries. Studies of lengthy dream diaries from a diverse array of

individuals reveal that there are large individual differences in dream content as well as a high

degree of consistency in what a person dreams about over the space of several months or years, or

even 40 and 50 years in the cases of the two longest dream series analyzed to date. There are also

striking continuities between dream content and waking life, making possible accurate predictions

about the concerns and interests of the dreamers.

In order to link dream content with the waking thoughts and behavior of the dreamer, the Hall/Van

de Castle system makes one basic assumption: the frequency with which a dream element appears

reveals the concerns and interests of the dreamer. That is, frequency is assumed to be an indicator of

intensity (Hall and Van de Castle, 1966:13--14). The idea that frequency reveals concerns and

interests means any statistically significant deviation from the norms in either a high or low direction

should relate to psychologically unique aspects of the dreamer's waking thoughts or behavior. The

formula for the significance of differences between two independent proportions is used to determine

statistically significant deviations from the norms; more importantly, the magnitude of any

statistically significant differences, that is, the "effect size," is determined by Jacob Cohen's (1977:

chap. 6) "h" statistic. For readers unfamiliar with statistics, these methods are explained in an

appendix. To make it unnecessary for readers to calculate either of these two statistics, the appendix

includes tables from which they can be determined with considerable ease. This statistical appendix

is best read in conjunction with the introduction to chapter 4.

Dreams and Dream Reports

Just what is being studied when we say we are analyzing "dream" content? The word "dream" has

three possible meanings. It can refer to (1) an experience during sleep; (2) what is remembered upon

awakening; or (3) what is reported to others, usually prefaced by "I had this dream" or "last night I

dreamt that..." Put another way, there is an experienced dream, a remembered dream, and a reported

dream. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing what people are dreaming or what they remember

until they report their recall of the dreaming experience in words. Thus, only the reported dream has

an objective, or public, existence. Of necessity, then, this book will deal only with the reported

dream, usually referred to as a "dream report" or "dream narrative." The phrase "dream content" will

be used to designate what is found in the dream report (Hall and Van de Castle, 1966: 17-18; Hall

and Nordby, 1972: 12).

Dream reports are a unique type of document. Most of what is spoken or written is meant to

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influence other people or communicate with them, but dream reports are descriptive accounts

based on memories of an experience that happened during sleep. On occasion they might be used to

influence a psycho-therapist or communicate something to a friend, but for the most part they are

"representational," not "instrumental," communications. Moreover, dream reports of the kind used by

dream researchers are not generally self-initiated. That is, very few of the people who provide dream

reports for our studies would have written down their dreams if they had not been asked to do so,

although those who keep dream diaries for their own personal reasons are an important exception.

Then too, because dreams are usually experienced as something that just happens to the dreamer, and

not as something intended, people do not tend to accept as much responsibility for their dreams as

they do for what they say or write during waking life. In all these ways, dream reports differ from

other types of oral or written reports (Hall and Van de Castle, 1966: 21).

The quantitative study of dream content is not without its difficulties. There can be problems of

bias in the collection of dream reports; for example, aspects of dream content may be altered or

deemphasized on the basis of instructions given to the dreamer. Nor is there any guarantee that some

subjects do not make up dream reports or alter details of what they actually remember. However,

none of these problems is a serious one. Most of the dream reports utilized in the studies to be

discussed in this book were collected from anonymous volunteer subjects with basically the same

instructions. As for the fabrication of some dreams in a sample, or the deliberate alteration of certain

details, this presents no problem in terms of our general findings because they are based on very

large numbers of dream reports.

Dream Series and Dream Sets

Dream reports can be grouped in two different ways, as "dream series" or as "dream sets." A

"dream series" consists of two or more dream reports from the same person; a "short" dream series

contains anywhere from two to 99 dream reports, and a "long" dream series contains 100 or more

dream reports. The phrase "dream set" is used to describe both (1) dream reports from persons of a

certain "type" (e.g., men, women, children, schizophrenics, Americans) or (2) dream reports of a

certain "type" collected from a wide range of people (e.g., dreams of being chased, dreams of

falling). The same dream reports are sometimes part of both a series and a set. For example, if we

took all dream reports of being chased from hundreds of different dream series, we would have a set

of chase dreams. For our purposes, the most important example of a dream set drawn from many

dream series concerns the normative studies of the dream reports of European-American college men

and women reported in detail in chapter 4. This normative study is based upon five dream reports

drawn at random from longer series contributed by 100 men and 100 women at Case Western

Reserve University and Baldwin-Wallace College in Cleveland, Ohio, between 1947 and 1950 (Hall

and Van de Castle, 1966:158).

The Importance of "Blind Analysis"

It is our strong belief that content analyses should be done with no knowledge of the dreamer if

such studies are to be convincing evidence for the usefulness of content analysis. Such "blind

analyses" are essential because there is always the possibility, even with this objective and

quantitative method, that the analyst is reading into the dream reports what she or he already knows

from free associations or biographical information, rather than gaining new insights and information

from the dream reports themselves.

It is of course necessary and inevitable that a dream analyst will have other information if he or

she is treating the dreamer in a clinical setting. But such clinical analyses, however beneficial

therapeutically or useful in generating testable hypotheses about dream meaning, always will be

suspect by rigorous scientific standards. This is not only due to the fact the analyst has other

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information available that might be influencing interpretations, but because such dream analyses

are a form of "post hoc" interpretation based on reasoning from the present to the past. The criticism

of "retrospective" analyses as unable to demonstrate the existence of causality is a cross borne by all

clinical theories.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to answer this type of criticism with experimental studies in the

case of dreams. Experimental studies of the cognitive process of dreaming have shown that some

external (e.g., water drops, hearing significant names) and internal (e.g., thirst) stimuli can

sometimes have a modifying influence on dream content, and heightened emotional or motivational

states can change the general vividness or emotionality of dreams (e.g., Berger, 1963; Witkin and

Lewis, 1967; Witkin, 1969; Bokert, 1967; Hoelscher, et al., 1981). However, beyond a general

demonstration of the psychological lawfulness of the dream process, experimental studies have not

been able to tell us very much about the meaning of most dream content or about the relationship

between dream content and either waking thought or behavior (cf. Antrobus, 1990: 4, and

Cartwright, 1990:179).

Given the limited usefulness of retrospective analyses on the one hand and experimental studies

on the other in the study of dream content, blind analyses using quantitative methods become the

best approach to the scientific study of dream meaning. As we will see, this approach is especially

compelling when dream series are used to make many specific predictions about a person's

conceptions, concerns, and interests. In those cases where the dreamer is known to the researcher,

predictions should be made in advance about the nature of the dream content and the dream reports

should be coded by someone who does not know the predictions.

Not all the studies reported in this book are based on blind analyses, but in many studies the

person doing the quantitative content analysis knew only the gender and/or nationality of the

dreamer, or was unaware of the purpose of the study. Whatever the limitations of previous studies,

however, the future clearly lies with blind analyses of dream content if the study of dream meaning

is to be taken seriously by social scientists.

Dreaming and Daydreaming

Many different questions can be asked about dreaming and dreams, and there is a large literature

on each of them. Since the discovery in 1953 of two different types of sleep--active, fast-wave

Rapid-Eye-Movement (REM) sleep and slow-wave, quiescent Non-REM (NREM) sleep--there have

been thousands of psychophysiological studies of sleep and dreams by researchers all over the world

(e.g., Aserinsky and Kleitman, 1953; Dement, 1955; Dement and Kleitman, 1957; Hartmann, 1967;

see Ellman and Antrobus, 1991, for one major summary). In psychological terms, these researchers

are searching for physiological correlates of dreaming. Some of them believe dreaming occurs

almost exclusively in REM sleep, and that we therefore know something about the neurophysiology

of dreaming (e.g., Hobson, 1988; Hobson and McCarley, 1977; McCarley, 1989), but others dispute

this conclusion, claiming that the presence of fully developed dreams shortly after sleep onset and

during NREM sleep suggests we still know little about the psychophysiology of the dream process

(e.g., Foulkes, 1962, 1985, 1993a; Vogel, 1978; Cavallero, et al., 1992; Cicogna, 1994).

There is also an important literature on dreaming as a cognitive process. It builds on the

burgeoning research in the area of waking cognition to show that much of what was previously

inexplicable about dreaming can be understood in terms of recent findings and concepts developed in

the study of waking consciousness and memory. David Foulkes has been the major contributor to

this effort; his Dreaming: A Cognitive-Psychological Analysis (1985) synthesizes what is known

about dreaming from laboratory studies with findings on waking cognition and presents many new

hypotheses for future investigation. The work of John Antrobus (1977, 1990), Harry Hunt (1986,

1989), and Donald Kuiken (1986) also is important in this area. Still others have done ingenious

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experimental studies in the sleep laboratory suggesting possible psychological functions for

dreams. The major contributor to this area of study has been Harry Fiss (1983, 1986, 1991).

As fascinating and informative as this work is, it will not be discussed in this book because it does

not provide detailed answers to questions about dream content and its correspondence to waking

thought and behavior. The biology of dreaming does not tell us the psychological meaning of dreams

(cf. Fiss, 1979, 1991). The dreaming brain and the dreaming mind are two different issues, one

neurophysiological, one psychological. Similarly, the study of dreaming as a cognitive process has

made a great contribution by showing that dreams are psychologically meaningful in a general sense,

but few of these studies help us to understand the meaning of specific dream reports or the

relationship between dream content and waking thought or behavior. Then too, dreams could have

no "functions" at all in terms of either evolutionary survival or individual adaptation, but still be

psychologically meaningful in terms of internal coherence and correlations with waking thought and

behavior (e.g. Antrobus, 1993; Foulkes, 1993a).

There is also an interesting literature on daydreaming, reveries, and extraneous thoughts, based in

a variety of techniques, including thought-sampling by means of pagers carried by people going

about their everyday lives. Just as our studies show that dream content has continuities with waking

life, these studies suggest the dreamlike nature of some waking thought (e.g., Singer, 1966, 1975,

1988; Klinger, 1971, 1990, Starker, 1978; Foulkes, 1994). This literature will figure importantly in

our theoretical comments in the final chapter. Relevant findings also will be referred to at a few

places in the intervening chapters. To underscore the relationship between dream content and relaxed

waking thought, we have adopted Klinger's (1971) phrase "current concerns" because it characterizes

the major content of both forms of cognition. Our former phrase, "emotional preoccupations," will be

used interchangeably. "Unfinished business" and "unfinished intentions" also express part of this

concept, but "current concerns" and "emotional preoccupations" allow for the positive interests

sometimes appearing in dreams.

For the most part, though, this book will be focused on the quantitative study of dream content and

its relationship to such factors as gender, age, nationality, and individual differences. Its findings

stand on their own, whatever theory turns out to be right concerning the neurophysiological

correlates of dreaming, or whatever cognitive theory eventually explains the production of the

dreams reported to investigators. Similarly, there are enough differences between dreams and

daydreams to repay a primary concern on dreams as a unique experience in our lives.

The Meaning of Content Analysis

In the most general sense, "content analysis" is the search for meaningful regularities and patterns

in written documents. In principle it can be done "qualitatively," as when we use our intuition or our

general understanding of language, or it can be done "quantitatively." Historically, however, content

analysis as the phrase is used by social scientists has meant the attempt to convert verbal, written, or

other symbolic materials into numbers so statistical analysis can be performed. This purpose is

accomplished by formulating categories, tabulating frequencies for those categories, and determining

percentages, proportions, or ratios. Comparisons are then made with "norms" or control groups.

In practice, there is not a hard and fast line between the qualitative and the quantitative. One can

shade into the other. We often begin with an implicit set of categories and develop a rough idea of

the frequency of elements fitting into those categories. Next we create more explicit, carefully

defined categories, and then we make a more detailed search of the document for exact frequencies.

This is in fact the process used by Hall (1951) in his early work.

Thus, quantitative content analysis often develops out of impressionistic qualitative analyses as an

attempt to minimize personal bias and make possible greater agreement among investigators who are

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