Dreaming : Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams
Kluwer Academic/Human Sciences Press, Inc., New York City

Dreaming Volume 13, Number 2, June 2003
 
 


Contents

Dream Imagery Becomes More Intense After 9/11/01
Ernest Hartmann, Robert Basile
Page 61

Can Dreams During Pregnancy Predict Postpartum Depression?
Tamar Kron, Adi Brosh
Page 67

Working with Dreams in Psychotherapy: The Therapists’ Perspective
Rachel E Crook, Clara E. Hill
Page 83

The Use of the Strauch Scale to Study Dream Reports from Sacred Sites in England and Wales
Stanley Krippner, Paul Devereux, Adam Fish
Page 95

The Words of Adolescents’ Dreams, A Quantitative Analysis
Alfio Maggiolini, Paolo Azzone, Katia Provantini, Daniele Viganò, Salvatore Freni
Page 107

Erratum
Page 119

 

Abstracts


Dream Imagery Becomes More Intense After 9/11/01

Ernest Hartmann and Robert Basile

Dreaming: Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams. Vol 13(2) 61-66, June 2003.

We examined a series of twenty dreams - the last ten dreams recorded before 9/11/01 and the first ten dreams recorded after 9/11/01 - from each of sixteen individuals in the United States who regularly record all their dreams. Blind scoring using established scales demonstrated that dreams after 9/11/01 were characterized by more intense imagery, but were not longer nor more “dreamlike,” compared to data before 9/11/01. The dreams after 9/11/01 did not contain significantly more content related to the attacks. The results show that traumatic events such as the attacks of 9/11/01 have a detectable effect on dreams - specifically an increase in dream image intensity - in a population of dream recorders. Whether this finding can be generalized to the entire population is not clear from this preliminary study. The results of this study are consistent with previous findings that dream image intensity is related to emotional arousal.

KEY WORDS: dreams; trauma; 9/11/01; contextualizing image; central image; dream image.


Can Dreams During Pregnancy Predict Postpartum Depression?

Tamar Kron and Adi Brosh

Dreaming: Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams. Vol 13(2) 67-81, June 2003.

Postpartum depression (henceforth PPD) is an emotional disturbance which occurs in as much as 20% of the childbearing population. This study attempted to ascertain whether dreams, offering unconscious expression of internal emotional processes, could help to identify early signs of PPD.
It was hypothesized that differences would be found in the “emotional dream work” of pregnant women who either later developed or did not develop PPD. 166 women participated in the two stages of the study. During stage I, the women were interviewed in the last trimester of their first pregnancies. The interview included a demographic questionnaire and an account of a dream. During stage II, the women were interviewed 6-10 weeks after giving birth. The second interview included only the EPDS scale for affirming or denying the occurrence of PPD.
The findings of the study confirm the hypothesis that dreams of pregnant women can differentiate among women who are or are not at-risk for PPD. It was found that more unpleasant dreams and dreams expressing apprehension were found among women who did not later develop PPD, than among women who did develop PPD.

KEY WORDS: postpartum depression; prediction of dreams during pregnancy.


Working with Dreams in Psychotherapy: The Therapists’ Perspective

Rachel E. Crook and Clara E. Hill

Dreaming: Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams. Vol 13(2) 83-93, June 2003.

129 therapists completed a 70-item questionnaire about working with dreams in psychotherapy. Almost all therapists (92%) worked with dreams in psychotherapy at least occasionally (92%). Therapists reported that 15% of clients had brought dreams into therapy during the past year. Therapists engaged more in exploratory than insight- or action-oriented activities when working with dreams. They were more likely to work on dreams with clients who had troubling dreams or who were interested in working on dreams, but were unlikely to work on dreams with schizophrenic or psychotic clients. Those clinicians who were more likely to work with dreams had more training, higher estimated dream recall, more positive attitudes toward dreams, and did more personal dream work than clinicians who were not likely to work with dreams.

KEY WORDS: dream interpretation; attitude towards dreams; therapist training; dream activities.


The Use of the Strauch Scale to Study Dream Reports from Sacred Sites in England and Wales

Stanley Krippner, Paul Devereux, and Adam Fish

Dreaming: Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams. Vol 13(2) 95-105, June 2003.

Thirty-five volunteers spent between one and five nights in one of four unfamiliar outdoor “sacred sites” in England and Wales where they were awakened following rapid eye movement periods and asked for dream recall. They also monitored their dreams in familiar home surroundings, keeping dream diaries. Equal numbers of site dreams and home dream reports were obtained for each volunteer. Two judges, working blind and independently, evaluated each of the resulting 206 dream reports, using the Strauch Scale which contains criteria for identifying “bizarre,” “magical,” and “paranormal” elements. Of the 103 site dream reports, 46 fell into one of these categories, versus 31 of the home dream reports. A number of explanations exist for this difference, including expectancy, suggestion, the effect of unfamiliar surroundings, the nature of the volunteers' awakenings, and possible anomalous properties of the sacred sites. The latter possibility, however, is unlikely due to the fact the 22 volunteers reported site dreams containing Strauch Scale items, while 20 reported home dreams containing these content items, a minimal difference.

KEY WORDS: content analysis; dream reports; sacred sites.


The Words of Adolescents’ Dreams: A Quantitative Analysis

Alfio Maggiolini, Paolo Azzone, Katia Provantini, Daniele Viganò, and Salvatore Freni

Dreaming: Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams. Vol 13(2) 107-117, June 2003.

This research detects the most common words recurring in 326 adolescents’ dream language. The analyzed dreams have been previously recorded and then transcribed. Grouping words, we obtained the frequency of the main parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives and pronouns). Among the nouns, far more frequently represented are terms that refer to important objects of an affective relation. Other significant nouns relate to objects linked to both familial and extra-familial environments. Words related to family relations declined in frequency as age increased and were substituted by terms that refer to relations among friends and to the external world and its objects. Some of these results can be usefully compared with the conclusions derived from the application of other methods of content analysis. This method using dream language analysis could be applied to research concerning dream content, also through specific dictionaries (groups of words defined and classified in relation to a certain theme).

KEY WORDS: dream content; text analysis; adolescence.

 


 

 

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