A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read.
— The Talmud, quoted in Morewedge and Norton (2009)
Dreams are elusive and mysterious creatures, but, that hasn’t stopped people form trying to understand them. In many ancient cultures, dreams were meaningful experiences, more or less as real as waking life. Dreams were considered portents of future disasters, or the soul leaving the body to gain spiritual knowledge or talk to ancestors.
Modern theories are less extravagant, but certainly diverse, especially when it comes to how much importance they give to the content of dreams. On one extreme are Freudian theories which hold that one’s deepest, sometimes unconscious desires are reflected in dreams (wish-fulfillment perspective). On the other extreme are theories that suggest dreams result from the forebrain’s attempts at controlling the chaotic firing of neurons (activation-synthesis perspective). Ones in the middle: the problem-solving perspective (dreams help sift through previously gathered information to discover solutions) and reverse-learning theory (dreams help forget unnecessary information) give some importance to the content of dreams.
In 2009, a study by Carey Morewedge and Michael Norton had found that students from the United States, South Korea, and India were more likely to endorse the Freudian theory (that dreams reveal hidden truths) compared to other theories.
In a replication of this 2009 study, a new study by Joshua L. Williams et al. tested which of these theories people were instinctively drawn to. Participants were read theory descriptions and asked to indicate how much they agreed with each of the four (above mentioned) theories under two distinct conditions – when provided citations indicating the author(s) of the theory and when citations were not provided. This was done to see if Freud’s name made a significant impact on people’s endorsement of dream theories.
In a successful replication of earlier studies, regardless of whether citations were provided, people agreed most with the Freudian perspective.
“These results seem to indicate that the vast majority of individuals likely do agree that dreams may contain some deeper, hidden meaning or truth, rather than being swayed by a reference to Freud.”
Read more about the study here.
