Why Do We Remember Our Dreams?

Incubation has, of course, a long and reputable history in antiquity. In the modern world, the reasons for wanting to remember dreams have changed - nobody believes any more that an appropriate dream will cure physical illness, or perhaps predict the future. Rather, the influence of psychoanalysis has encouraged the belief that the analysis of dreams will help cure mental ills. While psychoanalysis is very expensive, time-consuming and not available on the National Health Service in the UK, and is therefore practiced on only a small number of wealthy neurotics living in larger cities, its influence has by no means been confined to those directly benefiting from treatment. Especially in the US, there is a widespread belief that people should actively seek ways of developing themselves. Meditation, yoga and psychotherapy have all been taken up by Westerners as ways of helping them to cope and give meaning to their lives. One prevalent notion is that this self-improvement can be achieved by encouraging less rational, more intuitive styles of thinking, and that dreams represent this ideal.

Modem exponents of this ideal include Anne Faraday (1972, 1975) and Paul Garfield (1974), whose books encourage the reader not only to keep dream diaries but also to attempt to alter their dreams. Griffin and Foulkes (1977) report an experimental study of the ability of subjects to influence their own dreams. Twenty-nine subjects were selected who claimed to have already successfully controlled what they were going to dream, and who were strongly motivated to prove that this was indeed possible. They prepared lists of their intended dream topics, and kept daily records of their efforts at control and the dreams they recalled. Four judges then tried to match the reported dreams with the topics, identifying between five and nine of the 29 target suggestions, barely more than a chance rate. This disappointing result indicates that control over ones own dreams is much more difficult than Garfield and Faraday suggest.

Some memorable dream themes

While dreaming is inevitably idiosyncratic and personal, a number of scenarios regularly recur for many people. Particular sensations, such as of falling or immobility, are occasional but almost universal. Dreams of being chased and of flying are also more frequent than one might expect, given that neither of these events happen frequently, or at all, in real life. The dream topics discussed here are by no means representative of the dreams reported from laboratory awakenings, some of which are quite uncommon. In fact, one study found that 'typical dreams' (for example of loss of teeth, nudity, death, flying, examinations) constituted less than 1 per cent of dreams collected from REM sleep awakenings (Snyder, 1970).

However, these dreams represent the more interesting and memorable products of our sleeping minds, and it would be churlish not to say anything about them simply because they rarely surface in the laboratory.

Positive correlation coefficient of 0.87 between these two samples' dream rates for 34 topics - accounting for over 75 per cent of the variance. (This correlation is somewhat inflated by the number of topics that hardly anybody in either group dreamt about, but using only the 15 topics dreamt about by at least half of one of the groups still gives a fairly high correlation of 0.63 between the groups.) Some differences were explicable only in terms of cultural factors, as indicated in the table, but the most remarkable thing about these data is the general similarity between the rates for two groups of people living thousands of miles apart.