Do dreams affect our behaviour?
This was a question from an anonymous reader in January.
Well, I’m glad you asked! It gives me a chance to talk about a piece of research that one of my students and I completed a number of years ago. By the way, she has now become a very successful tattoo artist, so I guess psychology may be useful in all sorts of career choices.
We looked at two things: the content of dreams (that is, what people dream about) and the content of daily automatic thoughts (that is, what people think about at the back of their minds as they carry on with their daily lives).
We found 140 volunteers. We asked them to set aside at least 30 minutes every morning and to keep a dream journal for a week. During that week, they wrote down the details of their dreams as accurately as they could, for 30 minutes before doing anything else. In the end we had several dreams from each participant.
We had several “experts” who read all these dreams and coded their content. We had around 100 categories, for example: being a victim of violence, running away from something, breaking up with someone, feeling jealous, etc. If the dream was related to one or more of these categories, the experts would tick the box, and that’s how each dream was “quantified”. You can think about it as adding hashtags to dreams.
Automatic thoughts are thoughts that occur just below the surface of your conscious awareness. They accompany everything you do, like a running commentary. Stop reading right now and answer the following question: What were you thinking about in the last 5 minutes? You will realise that there were many thoughts that crossed your mind, and you were not always fully aware of them. They become more explicit once you purposefully focus your attention on them. Some psychologists believe that the content of your automatic thoughts is closely related to your personality and behaviour. For example, if you analyse automatic thoughts of patients with depression, you will find that they are especially gloomy, unrealistic, exaggerated and catastrophic.
Anyway, we gave our 140 volunteers small notebooks and agreed that they would keep a record of their automatic thoughts for a week. During this week, we sent them all 49 messages (7 days, 7 times a day, at random times during the day). Every time they received the message, they had to stop whatever they were doing, take the notebook and write what they had been thinking about in the 5 minutes before they received the message. So in the end we had 49 mini-essays from each participant. The same experts coded these essays with the same categories.
Do you see where I’m going with this?
The next step was to build a mathematical model (we used something known as Markov Chains) to see which of the following two hypotheses is true:
Hypothesis 1: The content of our daily thoughts influences the content of our dreams. In other words, some stuff occupies my mind on Monday, and then this stuff gets reflected in the dreams that I record on Tuesday morning. In other words, my dreams are a reflection of the thoughts and events of the previous day.
Hypothesis 2: The content of our dreams influences the content of our daily thoughts the following day. In other words, I see some dreams on Monday and these dreams affect my thoughts (and probably my behaviour) on Tuesday.
We found that Hypothesis 2 is more consistent with the data than Hypothesis 1. Contrary to the common belief that dreams are some kind of reflection of events of the previous day, it actually appears that dreams are more like a rehearsal of the day ahead. Perhaps when we go to sleep, our brain processes all kinds of possible scenarios of our future behaviour, tries different behaviours to see what will happen. If it’s something like a rehearsal, then we are likely to act it out when we are awake. If I have a dream about jealousy today, then I will feel jealous tomorrow. If I am aggressive and assertive in my dream today, then I will be aggressive and assertive tomorrow, at least in my thoughts.
This is a weird result and I cannot fully wrap my head around it, but yes, this research has shown that dreams do affect our behaviour.
I’m glad you asked.
By Mr Popov