A coding system for correlations between waking-life experiences and dreams.

Abstract

The correlation between waking-life experiences and dreams could be rated by both dreamers themselves (the self-rating) and independent judges (the external-rating). Yet a problem was whether results of these ratings were meaningful. To address the problem, we compared results of the external-rating with a random condition for coincidental correspondence which instructed judges to rate similar elements between each participant's dreams with another participant's waking-life experiences. Ninetyeight participants recorded major daily activities (MDAs), personally significant events (PSEs), major concerns (MCs), and dreams. Then both the self-rating and the external-rating were adopted. The self-rating found that most of dreams were related to waking-life experiences of the same day, while the external-rating only found about half dreams were related to waking-life experiences. In addition, results suggested that the external-rating could identify meaningful incorporation for both PSEs and MCs being incorporated into dreams, but this was not the case for MDAs, which may indicate that nonemotional waking-life experiences were rarely incorporated into dreams.

The priming effect of presleep conscious thoughts on dreams.

“…The frequency was higher than the frequency found in Wang et al (2023), which suggested that around 44% of dreams were correlated with emotional waking-life experiences. In this study, the method to find similar elements between conscious thoughts and dreams was similar to the rating method adopted in Wang et al (2023). So the different results between the current study and Wang et al (2023) may be because of the different methods to collect participant's waking-life experiences.…”

“…Our results showed that the presence of similar elements between each participant's presleep conscious thoughts and dreams of the same person was 74.3%. The frequency was higher than the frequency found in Wang et al (2023), which suggested that around 44% of dreams were correlated with emotional waking-life experiences. In this study, the method to find similar elements between conscious thoughts and dreams was similar to the rating method adopted in Wang et al (2023).…”

“…The paradigm adopted here can provide more recordings for waking-life experiences than the paradigm adopted in that study. Thus, we found more correlation between waking life and dream content than Wang et al (2023).…”

“…Wang et al’s (2023) operational definition for the judges was adopted for this process. In addition, similar to Wang et al (2023), in this process, independent judges only rated elements of conscious thoughts having been expressed clearly. For example, conscious thought: having dinner with my classmate.…”

“…Some diary research used the external judge method to study the day-residue effect, in which judges identified similar elements between waking-life experiences and dreams (e.g., see Wang et al, 2020). Recently, Wang et al (2023) reported successfully blind matches of reports of emotional waking-life experiences with dreams, by identifying four kinds of similar correspondences (characters, objects, locations, and actions) between waking-life experiences and dreams. In this study, similar to Wang et al (2023), in addition to the rating for correlations between each participant's presleep conscious thoughts and dreams of the same participant, we set up a randomized condition for coincidental correspondence, in which judges rated each participant's dreams with another participant's presleep conscious thoughts.…”