JOHN TIERNEY - ESSAY


Suppose last night you had two dreams. In one, God appears and commands you to take a year off and travel the world. In the other, God commands you to take a year off to go work in a leper colony.

Which of those dreams, if either, would you consider meaningful?

Or suppose you had one dream in which your friend defends you against enemies, and another dream in which that same friend goes behind your back and tries to seduce your significant other? Which dream would you take seriously?

Tough questions, but social scientists now have answers. We can start making distinctions, thanks to a series of studies of more than 1,000 people by two psychologists, Carey Morewedge of Carnegie Mellon University and Michael Norton of Harvard University.

The psychologists began by asking college students in three countries - India, South Korea and the United States - how much significance they attached to dreams. The majority in all three countries believed, along with Freud, that dreams reveal important unconscious emotions.

They also considered dreams to be valuable omens, as demonstrated in a study asking them to imagine they were about to take a plane trip. If, on the eve of the flight, they dreamed of the plane’s crashing, they were more likely to cancel the trip than if they saw news of an actual plane crash on their route. But when asked to recall their own dreams, they attached more significance to a negative dream if it was about someone they disliked, and they gave correspondingly more weight to a positive dream if it was about a friend.

A similar bias showed up when people were asked to imagine that they had had various dreams starring a friend or a deity. People rated a dream about a friend protecting them against attackers as being more “meaningful”than a dream about their own romantic partner faithlessly kissing that same friend. People who believed in God were more likely than agnostics to be swayed by divine apparitions.

But even the nonbelievers showed a weakness for certain heavenly dreams, like one in which God commanded them to take a year off to travel the world.

Dreamers’self-serving bias is tactfully defined as a“motivated approach to dream interpretation”by Dr.Morewedge and Dr.Norton in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. When asked if this“motivated approach”might also affect dream researchers, Dr.Morewedge pointed to Freud’s tendency to find what he was looking for - sex - in his“Interpretation of Dreams.”

“Freud himself suggested that dreams of flying revealed thoughts of sexual desire,”Dr.Morewedge noted.“Interestingly, in the same text, Freud also suggested that dreams about the absence of the ability to fly - i.e., falling - also indicate succumbing to sexual desire. One might interpret this as evidence that scientists are just as self-serving as laypeople when interpreting their dreams.”

Dr.Morewedge and Dr.Norton note that dreams can be indicators of people’s emotional state. Dreams can also become self-fulfilling prophecies simply because people take them so seriously, Dr.Morewedge and Dr.Norton say.

“When friends and loved ones have disturbing dreams,”Dr.Morewedge suggested,“one may need to do more than say,‘It was just a dream.’”