Dream Recall, Attitude Towards Dreams and Mental Health

Freud’s (1) theory of dream recall explains low dream recall frequency as a consequence of repression. According to his theory, dreams containing unacceptable drives or wishes which were not sufficiently altered by the dream-censor are repressed to prevent conscious knowledge of these contents. If one views repression as an inadequate coping strategy, low dream recall would reflect poor adjustment. The findings regarding the relationship between repression as trait and dream recall, however, are inhomogeneous and have not supported the assumption of a strong correlation between these two variables (overview: (2)). Case material of patients undergoing psychotherapy (e.g., (3)) and controlled studies (4) have shown that working with dreams can be of benefit for the person and recalled dreams can thus enhance mental health. The salience hypothesis of dream recall proposed by Cohen and MacNeilage (5) predicts an opposite relationship between dream recall and emotional stress to that of Freud. They demonstrated that the more intense the negative mood in the evening is, the more often dreams are recalled the following morning, i.e., stress and problems which affect pre-sleep mood are followed by negatively-toned dreams (cf. (6)) which tend to be recalled more easily (e.g., (7, 8)). Regarding the personality trait of neuroticism, McElroy (9) and Bone (10) have found a positive correlation with dream recall frequency; a finding which was not replicated in subsequent studies (11-13). In view of these very inconclusive studies, the question as to whether mental health is related to high or low dream recall remains unsolved. Many studies indicate that a positive attitude towards dreams and thinking about dreams are strongly correlated with dream recall frequency (14-17). Interestingly, several studies (13,17,18) have found closer relationships between waking-life measures such as absorpDream Recall, Attitude Towards Dreams and Mental Health