Dreams.

[StringJunky]

Having a PhD makes you a scientist (and your work scientific) like standing in a garage makes you a car.

 

So, you don't need a PhD to be a scientist?

 

Now, will someone tell me what it'd mean for dreams mean something, and how we'd find out?

 

I think you need a large study with diaries of people's summaries of their innermost daily waking thoughts and their concurrent dreams. From these diaries detailing the waking and dreaming states, one could try and find a correlation between the dream content or symbolism and the subjects wakeful overall emotional state during the course of the study.

Edited December 8, 2011 by StringJunky

[DrmDoc]

One of the guys who put that site together is a research professor in psychology and sociology...had his PhD since 1962.

 

This an article by him about how to use his websites and methodology...seems quite serious and as clinically methodological as one could be in a difficult area of study:

 

http://www.asdreams....ams/domhoff.htm

Your independent review confirms, as I have said, that the site is a link to reliable evidence of ongoing scientific study of dream content for meaning contrary to an unsubstantiated claim to the contrary. If other followers here select the links and review the site, they will confirm what your efforts have revealed.

 

The website--it does look very scientific, doesn't it? It certainly takes on the form of science. Is it published in a high-quality peer-reviewed journal?

If "high-quality peer-reviewed" journals and articles are your sincere interest, what was the results of your Google Scholar search?

 

Now, will someone tell me what it'd mean for dreams mean something, and how we'd find out?

New directions in the study of dream content using the Hall and Van de Castle coding system

[/color][/size][/b] [color=#0000cc]Methods and measures for the [b]study [/b]of [b]dream [/b]content[/color]

Start with a Google Scholar search.

Edited December 8, 2011 by DrmDoc

[PhDwannabe]

If "high-quality peer-reviewed" journals and articles are your sincere interest, what was the results of your Google Scholar search?

 

1) lots of junk science and pseudoscience

2) studies which examine sleep in a more scientific context which don't attempt to establish the "meaning" of dreams

 

<br style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; background-color: rgb(248, 250, 252); ">New directions in the study of dream content using the Hall and Van de Castle coding system<br style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; background-color: rgb(248, 250, 252); ">

[/color][/b][size=2] [/size][color=#0000CC]Methods and measures for the [b]study [/b]of [b]dream [/b]content[/color]

 

Content is not meaning. Try again.

[DrmDoc]

1) lots of junk science and pseudoscience

2) studies which examine sleep in a more scientific context which don't attempt to establish the "meaning" of dreams

 

And there we have it. It is my opinion that you, like many who are disinterested and unstudied in dream science, consider all dream research and study "junk science and pseudoscience" regardless of the preponderance of peer-reviewed, scientifically obtained evidence to the contrary. Of the thousands of links to scholarly articles, that was all you found?

 

For the readers of this discussion with serious interest, the following is from a prior search of peer-reviewed articles whose links can be found with a Google Scholar search:

 

Taken from this peer-reviewed article The Effects of Current-Concern- and Nonconcern-Related Waking Suggestions on Nocturnal Dream Content, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and obtained through the EBSCO Host of an online university, Doctors Nikles, Breckt, Klinger, and Bursell concludes the following from their study of student participants over several nights in their sleep laboratory:

 

"…the evidence from this and other investigations confirms that dreams are meaningfully related to dreamers' current concerns and hence to their real lives. The findings of the present study also confirm the importance of current-concern content in moderating the effectiveness of presleep suggestions. They therefore contribute further evidence that dreams reflect current goal pursuits and that volitional processes continue to be active enough during sleep to influence dream imagery."

 

In this similarly obtain paper titled Dream Content and Psychological Well-Being: A Longitudinal Study of the Continuity Hypothesis and published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, Doctors Pesant and Zadra concludes:

 

"In summary, ours is the first longitudinal study to examine the relationship between people's level of psychological well-being and corresponding dream content characteristics. The findings obtained provide further empirical evidence for the continuity hypothesis and indicate that affect and social interactions represent two psychologically important dimensions in dream content that merit further study."

 

And in this paper, Relation Between Waking Sport Activities, Reading, and Dream Content in Sport Students and Psychology Students, published in the Journal of Psychology, Dr. Schredl's study suggests a relationship between waking-life experience and dreaming with:

 

"To summarize, the results of this study clearly show an effect of time spent in a particular waking-life activity on the rate of incorporating the waking-life activity into dreams. The findings also indicate that factors such as emotional involvement and associated worries might be of importance in explaining the relation between waking and dreaming. Future studies using longitudinal designs would shed more light on this relation and would help researchers to derive a more precise formulation of the continuity hypothesis."

 

The links to these articles do not work outside of the university's library site. However, I was able to find the following links to abstracts confirming these peer-reviewed papers conclusions:

 

http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1998-04530-018

 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jclp.20212/abstract

 

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a925359142

 

 

 

Content is not meaning. Try again.

Which confirms your earlier admission of not knowing "what meaning means" relative to dream content. For what other reason might there be a coding methodology of dream content for study if not for meaning--which, by the way, is an effort to determine the relevance, if any, of dream content to the psychological or material experiences of the dreamer.

Edited December 10, 2011 by DrmDoc

[charles brough]

This is what I learned:

 

There is the early period of the night's sleep when you sleep "deeply." This is the most important part in getting the needed rest. Later, the sleep is "lighter" and dreaming serves to keep us asleep as long as possible to satisfy mind and body need. Sometime we wake up gradually as the dream becomes less and less bazzar and fades into conscious worry or we wake up because the dreaming has been unpleasant and stirred up the hormones.

[Beast]

Well in science terms a dream is considered a way to keep you in the sleeping state and most dreams last for around 20mins most likely max from what i have read.

 

In psychology terms a dream can have some important things in them for example ive moved to a new school resently and the name of a new person person popped up in the dream and i havent forgot it.

 

But mostly its random pictures and thoughts as most people cannot remember dreams after a few mins

Edited January 4, 2012 by Beast

[DrmDoc]

Well in science terms a dream is considered a way to keep you in the sleeping state and most dreams last for around 20mins most likely max from what i have read.

 

In psychology terms a dream can have some important things in them for example ive moved to a new school resently and the name of a new person person popped up in the dream and i havent forgot it.

 

But mostly its random pictures and thoughts as most people cannot remember dreams after a few mins

You may want to read a bit more of the science, in discussion above, because maintaining the sleep state is unlikely the purpose of dreaming given dreams can and do cause arousal from sleep. It is likely that dreaming is an evolved byproduct of activations in the brain arising from vestigial metabolic processess associated with the prolonged inactivity and food privation our animal ancestors likely experienced.