Continuity: Knowing each other, emotional closeness, and appearing together in dreams.

Abstract

Continuity between entities in dreams and those in waking life arises from memory. In broad terms, the people a dreamer knows are associated in the dreamer's memory, and during dreaming people associated in memory tend to occur together in dreams. To obtain details, we gave a dreamer a questionnaire about whether pairs of major people know each other in waking life, and if so, how emotionally close they are. The greater the emotional closeness of a pair, the more likely the pair was to occur in a dream together. The more often a pair co-occurred in a dream, the more likely the pair was to know each other in waking life. In waking life, relationships with kin decay more slowly than relationships with others. A consequence would be that over time, as new friends replace the old, kin tend to become associated with many people. We found that in waking life, those who knew the most others were family members. People who occurred with the most other people in dreams were also family members. As relationships decay over time, memory for the relationships degrades as well. To maintain memories, we propose that associations between people in memory are refreshed when people are dreamed about together.

Waking-life and dream social networks: People mix differently but their centrality is similar.

“…The relevant part is the participant's cognitive social network , her memory of people, and their relations (Bayer et al, 2020; Brands, 2013; Brashears & Quintane, 2015; Krackhardt, 1987; Smith et al, 2020). In previous work (Han & Schweickert, 2016), we found that the more often two people co-occurred in the dreams of our participant, the more likely the dreamer said they know each other in waking life. (We also found, not directly relevant here, that the greater the emotional closeness of two people, the more likely they were to be in a dream together.)…”

“…Because unusual or bizarre events occasionally occur in dreams, it is natural to wonder whether dream contents are random. Results in an earlier article (Han & Schweickert, 2016) show that contents are not random in a simple way, because the frequency of co-occurrence in dreams is correlated with emotional closeness in waking life. Here we consider the possibility that people occur in a dream together with a constrained kind of randomness.…”

“…Responses were received on February, 24, 2013. For more details about the procedure and discussion of reliability for the question about pairs, which was high, see Han and Schweickert (2016).…”

“…The main aspects of the method are described here. Further information and the questionnaire can be found in Han and Schweickert (2016). The Purdue Institutional Review Board determined this study is exempt from review.…”

Dream journaling: Stability and relation to personality factors.

“…Moreover, modern dream research is utilizing long dream series to study specific topics, for example, the effects of traveling in waking life on dream locations (Marrou & Arnulf, 2018), social networks of dream characters (Han & Schweickert, 2016), the long-term effect of applying a lucid dream induction technique (Schredl, 2013), the spiritual journey reflected in dreams (Bulkeley, 2018; Paquette, 2018), or the frequency of romantic partners still appearing in dreams years after separation (Domhoff, 2003; Schredl, 2018a).…”