What You Do Before Going to Bed Will Have An Effect on Your Dreams

It is very well known that dreams often contain elements - visual or idealization - that can be identified as part of the previous day's experience. Much of our dream content is not so easily traced, but the incorporation of 'day residues' into dreams is very well established. In a systematic study of his own dream life, Freud tried to relate all his dreams to feelings and thoughts experienced the previous day. It is not possible to do this without assuming that dream-work transformations have taken place. That is, the 'manifest dream's' apparently irrelevant and unpredictable content is deemed to have been systematically arrived at from a 'latent dream', whose implicit content has been the subject of some extensive dream-work. With sufficient ingenuity, an analyst can therefore trace any reported dream back to certain themes that he or she believes are preoccupying the dreamer. If we could be sure that all dream content is determined in this way, then this would not be an unreasonable thing to do.

Experimental studies relating pre-sleep stimulation to dream content are not encouraging in this respect. Foulkes and Rechtschaffen (1964) showed either an amusing or a violent TV western to adult subjects before bedtime and found that direct incorporation of the content of either film was very rare indeed, although the violent film reliably induced more vivid, emotional dreams. A similar study, using 7-11 year-old children as subjects (Foulkes et al.y 1967), compared the subjects' dream reports after viewing a violent western and a bland film about baseball. Fourteen out of the 179 dream reports were judged to contain elements from the films. There was no difference in the frequency of incorporation of scenes from the two films - the more violent film was not followed by any more intense or hostile dreams than the bland one, perhaps indicating how accustomed these young subjects were to watching violent westerns!

Goodenough et al. (1975) later confirmed that the emotional content of dreams could be affected by pre-sleep stimulation, in this case a film entitled "Subcision" explicitly showed a series of operations carried out on the penis as part of a tribal aboriginal initiation rite. They found that the dreams reported after the screening of the stress-inducing film were more anxious than those reported after a neutral film.

Perhaps when parents knew what they were talking about when they do not allow their kids to play too excessively or watch any TV before going to sleep at night.