What Dreams Are Made Of: Different Dreamers: Age and Gender

All night long, Jared is drunk and talking in his incoherent mumbly monotone. Finally, I have enough and tell him off. I call him a boring bastard. Then I notice a baby girl standing inside a flaming fireplace. I go up to her and say sympathetically, "You must be very hot and uncomfortable." She agrees. I pick her up and I hold her, taking her away from the fire.

We're born to be dreamers—although it apparently takes a while to get all the equipment working. While parents-to-be fantasize about their babies, fetuses probably aren't dreaming about Mom and Dad. "Almost the entire state of being before we're born is REM sleep," says Mark Mahowald, director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis. "I can't imagine that there's a lot of conflict resolution going on in utero." Young children get a lot of REM sleep as well, which scientists think is probably stimulation for brain growth, not real dreaming. Researchers believe children have to reach a certain level of intellectual maturity, around the age of 8 or 9, before their dreams resemble adults'.

Inge Strauch, a psychology professor at the University of Zurich, has collected 550 dreams from a group of twenty-four 9- to 15-year-olds she studied in her lab over a period of two years. She found that children dreamed about animals more often than adults and were more likely to report being victims than aggressors. They were also more likely to have "fantastic" dreams, while adults' dreams tend to contain more elements of reality. A typical fantastic dream from a 10-year-old Strauch studied included a cat asking for directions to the "cat bathroom." Similarly, an 11-year-old boy dreamed that a snake wanted to go up a ski lift.

Gender differences in dream content show up in studies of adults as well. The biggest myth? That adult dreams are "full of sex," says Domhoff, author of "The Scientific Study of Dreams." When they do have dreams that include sex, they're often about someone they're not really attracted to or some conflict, he says. "They are not often joyful occasions." In fact, about two thirds of the characters in men's dreams are men; gender is more evenly divided in women's dreams. These differences appear to be true in many different cultures. Men's dreams also involve more physical aggression than women's dreams; they're more likely to be about chasing, punching, breaking, stealing or killing, Domhoff says. A more typical expression of aggression in women's dreams would be rejection or an insult ("That dress makes you look fat").

A favorite topic for women: weddings. But they're not always happily-ever-after dreams. "Something always goes wrong," Domhoff says. "It's the wrong dress, the wrong guy, the wrong church." In one recorded on dreambank.net, a woman is about to get married and doesn't have anything to wear. "I ended up wearing a genie outfit, genie pants, a gauze orange top, slippers, a belt with bells on it, lots of jewelry and my hair in a ponytail," she wrote. "I remember reassuring myself by thinking it was close to Halloween."

Not surprisingly, new mothers frequently dream about their babies, says Tore Nielsen, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal, who has analyzed the content of 20,000 dreams collected over the Web. In a separate study of 220 new mothers' dreams, he found that "a lot of bad things happen to their infants—the cat eating them, or they're suddenly lost, or they left them in the care of a relative who left them in a shopping center."

3 Intro: We are all Fellini in the Middle of the Night

3 Page 1: History Of Dream Research

3 Page 2: Born to be Dreamers

Continued

4 Page 4: How We Use Dreams