How Dream Recall Frequency Shapes People's Beliefs about the Content of Their Dreams

Questionnaire studies often rely on self-report evaluations of past dream experiences to assess people's dream content. This approach, however, assumes that there exists a valid relationship between self-reported information on the content of one's everyday dreams and the dream experiences themselves. The goal of the present study was to test the idea that the way people construct beliefs about the content of their dreams depends on their level of dream recall frequency (DRF). Specifically, it was hypothesized that a) when memories of past dreams are readily available (i.e. when DRF is high), people's beliefs about their general dream content are closely related to their actual dream experiences, and b) when such memories are not easily available (i.e. when DRF is low), people's beliefs about their dream content is influenced by their affective state. Participants' (n = 84) affective state and belief about the degree of anxiety in their everyday dreams were assessed via self-reported questionnaires while DRF and dream content variables were calculated from a daily dream log. The results support the hypotheses and suggest that the beliefs people hold about the content of their dreams are not necessarily valid reflections of their actual dream experiences. Questionnaire studies have played and continue to play an important role in the scientific tradition of inquiry into dream content (e.g. Jacka, 1990). In these kinds of studies, participants' retrospective self-reported information concerning their dream experiences is viewed as a modest but valid way of assessing different aspects of the dream experiences themselves. But to what extent are our beliefs about various characteristics of our dream life an accurate portrayal of our everyday dream experiences? Are we correct in assuming that correlates of these beliefs are also correlates of the actual dream experiences? One important problem in studying dream content is the dissociation between dreaming and waking states. While dreaming occurs during sleep, active dream recall as well as the recording or sharing of one's dream occurs upon awakening. This implies that beliefs, attitudes and judgements about one's dream content are rarely constructed at the same time that the dream material is actually experienced. It can thus be argued that the continuity between dream experiences and the beliefs about them cannot be taken for granted. Since beliefs about the general content of everyday dreams are formed retrospectively, factors such as memory, personality, and individual biases can influence their construction. For instance, one recent study (Beaulieu-Prevost & Zadra, 2005) found that self-reported evaluations of dream recall frequency (DRF) are affected by attitudinal and mnemonic factors and that they show little relation to actual (prospective) measures of dream recall. Similar processes may be involved when people are asked to describe the general content of their dreams. Over 100 empirical studies have been published on dream recall (for reviews, see Blackgrove & Akehurst, 2000; Goodenough, 1991; Schredl & Montasser, 1996-97a; 1996-97b) and an overwhelming majority of them were aimed at identifying correlates of DRF. In most cases, the studies focused on explaining inter-individual variance in DRF instead of examining its role as an independent variable. It is our contention that dream recall represents not only a variable that needs to be adequately explained in and of itself, but also an important link between actual dream experiences and waking life factors such as attitudes, beliefs, estimates, and judgements about one's dreams. If the influence of dream experiences on waking life factors occurs primarily through the memories of these experiences, then the magnitude of the influence should be proportional to the availability of these memories. Two important characteristics of dreams are that they are easily forgotten upon awakening and that the frequency of recall varies greatly across individuals. …