So dreams remain mysterious; we don't yet know what purpose they serve, or exactly how to interpret them. But that doesn't mean research about media consumption and dreaming is nonexistent. In one study published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition in , older participants who grew up watching black and white television reported dreaming more in grayscale than those who had consumed color TV, suggesting that access to media might have some sort of effect.
Many dream researchers support an idea called the " continuity hypothesis ," which says we tend to dream about the people and issues that preoccupy our waking thoughts. This doesn't mean that dreams reflect our waking lives necessarily, just that they tend to be about the same people and issues that concern us when we're awake. And people are definitely dreaming about the internet , at least according to anecdotal reports.
Plenty of individuals say they experience social media-themed dreams, or dreams about apps they use for work, like the messaging service Slack. But is constantly being on the internet or consuming other new forms of media changing how we dream? Researchers like Jayne Gackenbach are trying to find out. Gackenbach, a psychology professor at MacEwan University, has been studying dreams and digital media since the s. She acknowledges that her work is often based on what people self-report.
That's a longstanding issue in any kind of dream research," she says. With that caveat, though, her research has found that playing videogames for a significant amount of time can alter both the content and the quality of a person's dreams. Gackenbach has also found that playing videogames may provide a "protection" against nightmares, at least for some male gamers.
That might be because videogames often simulate "fighting back" against threats, a scenario which is mimicked in the gamers' dreams. But playing videogames is not the same as scrolling on Facebook or sending messages on Snapchat.
It's possible that these activities impact our dreams in a different way—and Gackenbach is keen to learn how. Recently, she polled university students about their dreams and media habits. Specifically, she asked them to recall a dream that involved some sort of electronic media—such as television, videogames, or social media—and what electronic media they had consumed the previous day.
Students who used interactive media, like playing videogames or chatting with friends online, reported higher-quality dreams than those who, say, passively consumed TV shows. She presented her findings at the International Dream Conference in Arizona earlier this month. People in a relationship may dream of their partner. Web developers may see programming code. These circumstantial observations suggest that elements from the everyday re-emerge in dream-like imagery during the transition from wakefulness to sleep.
A study of adult dream reports found:. Another study investigated the relationship between dream emotion and dream character identification. Affection and joy were commonly associated with known characters and were used to identify them even when these emotional attributes were inconsistent with those of the waking state.
The findings suggest that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, associated with short-term memory, is less active in the dreaming brain than during waking life, while the paleocortical and subcortical limbic areas are more active. Freud maintained that undesirable memories could become suppressed in the mind. Dreams ease repression by allowing these memories to be reinstated. A study showed that sleep does not help people forget unwanted memories.
Instead, REM sleep might even counteract the voluntary suppression of memories, making them more accessible for retrieval. The findings of one study suggest that:. Dream-lag is when the images, experiences, or people that emerge in dreams are images, experiences, or people you have seen recently, perhaps the previous day or a week before.
The idea is that certain types of experiences take a week to become encoded into long-term memory, and some of the images from the consolidation process will appear in a dream. Events experienced while awake are said to feature in 1 to 2 percent of dream reports, although 65 percent of dream reports reflect aspects of recent waking life experiences.
The dream-lag effect has been reported in dreams that occur at the REM stage but not those that occur at stage 2.
A study exploring different types of memory within dream content among 32 participants found the following:. Researchers suggest that memories of personal experiences are experienced fragmentarily and selectively during dreaming. The purpose may be to integrate these memories into the long-lasting autobiographical memory. A hypothesis stating that dreams reflect waking-life experiences is supported by studies investigating the dreams of psychiatric patients and patients with sleep disorders.
In short, their daytime symptoms and problems are reflected in their dreams. Many authors agree that some traumatic dreams perform a function of recovery. One paper hypothesizes that the main aspect of traumatic dreams is to communicate an experience that the dreamer has in the dream but does not understand.
This can help an individual reconstruct and come to terms with past trauma. The themes of dreams can be linked to the suppression of unwanted thoughts and, as a result, an increased occurrence of that suppressed thought in dreams. The results demonstrate that there were increased dreams about the unwanted thought and a tendency to have more distressing dreams. They also imply that thought suppression may lead to significantly increased mental disorder symptoms.
Research has indicated that external stimuli presented during sleep can affect the emotional content of dreams. For example, the positively-toned stimulus of roses in one study yielded more positively themed dreams, whereas the negative stimulus of rotten eggs was followed by more negatively themed dreams. Up to now, the frequencies of typical dream themes have been studied with questionnaires. These have indicated that a rank order of 55 typical dream themes has been stable over different sample populations.
Some themes are familiar to many people, such as flying, falling, and arriving late. For example, from to , there was an increase in the percentage of people who reported flying in dreams.
This could reflect the increase in air travel. Relationships : Some have hypothesized that one cluster of typical dreams, including being an object in danger, falling, or being chased, is related to interpersonal conflicts. Sexual concepts : Another cluster that includes flying, sexual experiences, finding money, and eating delicious food is associated with libidinal and sexual motivations. Fear of embarrassment : A third group, containing dreams that involve being nude, failing an examination, arriving too late, losing teeth, and being inappropriately dressed, is associated with social concerns and a fear of embarrassment.
In neuroimaging studies of brain activity during REM sleep, scientists found that the distribution of brain activity might also be linked to specific dream features. Several bizarre features of normal dreams have similarities with well-known neuropsychological syndromes that occur after brain damage, such as delusional misidentifications for faces and places.
Dreams were evaluated in people experiencing different types of headache. Results showed people with migraine had increased frequency of dreams involving taste and smell. This may suggest that the role of some cerebral structures, such as amygdala and hypothalamus, are involved in migraine mechanisms as well as in the biology of sleep and dreaming.
Music in dreams is rarely studied in scientific literature. However, in a study of 35 professional musicians and 30 non-musicians, the musicians experienced twice as many dreams featuring music, when compared with non-musicians. Musical dream frequency was related to the age of commencement of musical instruction but not to the daily load of musical activity. Nearly half of the recalled music was non-standard, suggesting that original music can be created in dreams.
It has been shown that realistic, localized painful sensations can be experienced in dreams, either through direct incorporation or from memories of pain. However, the frequency of pain dreams in healthy subjects is low.
In one study, 28 non-ventilated burn victims were interviewed for 5 consecutive mornings during their first week of hospitalization. Results showed :. More than half did not report pain dreams.
However, these results could suggest that pain dreams occur at a greater frequency in populations currently experiencing pain than in normal volunteers. One study has linked frontotemporal gamma EEG activity to conscious awareness in dreams. The study found that current stimulation in the lower gamma band during REM sleep influences on-going brain activity and induces self-reflective awareness in dreams. Researchers concluded that higher order consciousness is related to oscillations around 25 and 40 Hz.
Recent research has demonstrated parallels between styles of romantic attachment and general dream content. Assessment results from 61 student participants in committed dating relationships of six months duration or longer revealed a significant association between relationship-specific attachment security and the degree to which dreams about romantic partners followed.
The findings illuminate our understanding of mental representations with regards to specific attachment figures. Researchers compared the dream content of different groups of people in a psychiatric facility. Participants in one group had been admitted after attempting to take their own lives. Their dreams of this group were compared with those of three control groups in the facility who had experienced:. Those who had considered or attempted suicide or carried out violence had were more likely to have dreams with content relating to death and destructive violence.
The right and left hemispheres of the brain seem to contribute in different ways to a dream formation. Researchers of one study concluded that the left hemisphere seems to provide dream origin while the right hemisphere provides dream vividness, figurativeness and affective activation level.
A study of adolescents aged 10 to 17 years found that those who were left-handed were more likely to experience lucid dreams and to remember dreams within other dreams.
Studies of brain activity suggest that most people over the age of 10 years dream between 4 and 6 times each night, but some people rarely remember dreaming. It is often said that 5 minutes after a dream, people have forgotten 50 percent of its content, increasing to 90 percent another 5 minutes later.
Most dreams are entirely forgotten by the time someone wakes up, but it is not known precisely why dreams are so hard to remember. There are factors that can potentially influence who remembers their dreams, how much of the dream remains intact, and how vivid it is. Age: Over time, a person is likely to experience changes in sleep timing, structure, and electroencephalographic EEG activity. Evidence suggests that dream recall progressively decreases from the beginning of adulthood, but not in older age.
Dream also become less intense. This evolution occurs faster in men than women, with gender differences in the content of dreams. Gender: A study of dreams experienced by males and females found no differences between the amount of aggression, friendliness, sexuality, male characters, weapons, or clothes that feature in the content. However, the dreams of females featured a higher number of family members, babies, children, and indoor settings than those of males.
Sleep disorders : Dream recall is heightened in patients with insomnia , and their dreams reflect the stress associated with their condition. The dreams of people with narcolepsy may a more bizarre and negative tone.
One study looked at whether dream recall and dream content would reflect the social relationships of the person who is dreaming.
College student volunteers were assessed on measures of attachment, dream recall, dream content, and other psychological measures. Everyone dreams, although we may not remember our dreams.
At different times of life or during different experiencs, our dreams might change. A study investigating anxiety dreams in children aged 9 to 11 years observed the following :. Studies comparing the dreams of pregnant and non-pregnant women showed that:. Those that give care to family or people who have long-term illnesses often have dreams related to that individual. A study following the dreams of adults that worked for at least a year with individuals at United States hospice centers noted :.
It is widely believed that oppressive dreams are frequent in people going through a time of bereavement. A study analyzing dream quality, as well as the linking of oppressive dreams in bereavement, discovered that oppressive dreams:.
In another study of people experiencing bereavement:. Younger people are more likely to dream in color. The number of people aged in their 20s, 30s and 40s dreaming in color increased through to
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