The Typical Dreams
Being chased, falling, the examination, the teeth: what everyone dreams, and how often.
The same dreams recur across populations, and the laboratory has counted them. Nielsen and his colleagues at Montreal (2003) gave 1,181 university students a questionnaire of 55 themes and asked which they had ever dreamed. At the top: being chased or pursued without being hurt (81.5 per cent), sexual experiences (76.5), falling (73.8), school, teachers, and studying (67.1), arriving too late (59.5), being on the verge of falling (57.7), trying again and again to do something (53.5), a living person as dead (54.1), flying (48.3), and sensing a presence in the room (48.3). Near the bottom: being an animal (8.0), seeing a UFO (7.7), and being an object (3.5). Teeth falling out, the dream the dream-books make most of, stood thirty-eighth at 18.8 per cent.
The list has held. Griffith, Miyagi, and Tago (1958) gave a shorter version to American and Japanese students and found nearly the same order in both; Schredl (2004) in Germany, Yu (2008) in Hong Kong, and Mathes (2014) in a second German sample found the same top ten with the same few sex differences: men dream more of sex, flying, finding money, magical powers, and killing someone; women more of a living person as dead, failing an examination, being frozen with fright, insects and spiders, and the lost toilet. Age moves the figures little between eighteen and the thirties. The themes cluster: a death–murder factor, a disaster factor, a falling–flying factor, snakes and insects, magic and myth, failure, and the chase.
What the typical dreams are is the question the theories divide on. Revonsuo (2000) built the threat-simulation theory on the chase, the fall, and the attack, which look like rehearsals of ancestral danger; Domhoff reads them as the continuity hypothesis at its broadest, since the student’s examination dream and the worker’s arriving-late dream are the day’s concerns in a stereotyped form. Nielsen found that the themes are not independent of waking life: those with more negative waking affect reported more of the threatening themes, and the dream of a presence in the room tracks sleep paralysis.
The reader can use the list as the researchers do. The Journal lets a dream be marked for the themes it contains, and “What returns” sets the reader’s own frequencies beside the Montreal prevalences, which are lifetime figures from students, not a norm for any one person: a dreamer who has never flown is ordinary, and one who falls every week is worth a second look at the day.
Sources
- Nielsen, T. A., Zadra, A. L., Simard, V., et al. (2003). “The typical dreams of Canadian university students.” Dreaming 13.
- Griffith, R. M., Miyagi, O., and Tago, A. (1958). “The universality of typical dreams: Japanese vs. Americans.” American Anthropologist 60.
- Schredl, M., et al. (2004). “Typical dreams: stability and gender differences.” Journal of Psychology 138.
- Mathes, J., Schredl, M., and Göritz, A. S. (2014). “Frequency of typical dream themes in most recent dreams: an online study.” Dreaming 24.
- Revonsuo, A. (2000). “The reinterpretation of dreams.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23.
A review of the literature for readers; not medical advice.