Researcher says dreams correlate with age, gender

Not all dream researchers agree about the symbolism of dreams.

Ivy Norris, field director of the Oklahoma School of Metaphysics, said she believes almost all dreams are important and can be interpreted. But some researchers believe dreams are more a result of waking concerns.

One such dream researcher is G. William Domhoff, an author and professor in psychology and sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has been studying dreams since the 1960s

In April 2008, he gave a lecture titled "The Awesome Lawfulness of Your Nightly Dreams” in which he outlined the results of his most recent research. In the lecture, Domhoff discussed some consistencies he found in his dream studies that led him to believe that dreams are usually based on plausible situations, are less bizarre than is often thought, and that dreaming is a gradual cognitive achievement that increases as people mature.

Dreams correlate with age, gender, culture and personal preoccupations, he said.

With his findings, he refuted the popular dream theories from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freud’s belief that the function of dreams is to preserve sleep is contradicted by the fact that babies and some adults rarely dream but sleep well, he said.

Jung’s theory that dreams compensate for underdeveloped aspects of the psyche rings untrue to Domhoff because several studies indicate that people most often dream about things they are concerned with in waking life.