DREAMS and DREAMING The Effect of Dreams on Waking Life

Many studies have investigated the effect of waking experience, e.g., pre-sleep stimuli, stress, major life events, traumata, on dream content and have supported the so-called continuity hypothesis of dreaming, i. e. waking experience is reflected in dreams (Overviews: 1-3). On the other hand, systematic research on the effects of drams on subsequent waking life is scarce, although a considerable amount of anecdotal evidence (4) indicates that dreams stimulate creativity in areas such as literature (e.g., Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, Steven Spielberg), art (e.g., Salvadore Dali, Henri Rousseau), music (e.g., Guiseppe Tartini) and science (e.g., Elias Howe, Nils Bohr). Nightmare research has shown that dreams with strong negative emotions affect daytime mood and can cause anxiety about falling asleep (e. g. [5]). In the following, empirical studies which have investigated the effects of dreams on waking life are reviewed. Wasserman and Ballif (6) have investigated the causes which may influence morning mood. Fifty subjects kept a diary over 28 days. Forty percent of the sample stated at least once that a dream was the major cause of the morning mood. The emotional tone produced in this way was balanced, i.e., dreams affected negative as well as positive emotions in the morning. The findings of Schredl and Doll (7), however, indicated that negative dream emotions affect morning mood to a larger extend than positive dream emotions. A questionnaire survey (8) including 265 patients of a family practice medical clinic elicited different possible effects of dreaming on awake behavior (e.g., dreams affect emotions, dreams affect waking activity, dreams used for creativity). The percentages of persons who stated that the effect was experienced sometimes, often or always ranged from 19.3% (dreams affect decisions) to 33.2% (dreams affect waking life). A factor analysis of 9 items, which was not explained in detail, led to a reduction to 7 items (loading on one factor) and, thus, implicated the existence of a general factor. Pagel and Vann (8) pointed out that gender differences were present in their data, i.e., women reported dream effects more often than men. These comparisons, however, were not controlled for dream recall frequency which was also elevated for women. It seems obvious that the frequency of dream effects is strongly related to dream recall frequency. The correlation coefficients in this study (9) ranged from r = .12 (dreams affect work) to r = .32 (dreams affect emotions). Similar, the findings that dream use is more pronounced in filmmakers (10) must be interpreted with caution since dream recall freDREAMS and DREAMING