Washington:
Dreaming is believing, for a new study has found that dreams affect people's judgement and behaviour as they believe that dreams contain hidden truths.
"Psychologists' interpretations of the meaning of dreams vary widely. But our research shows that people believe their dreams provide meaningful insight into themselves and their world," lead author Carey Morewedge said.
Researchers have based their findings on an analysis of a series of experiments, in which they surveyed over 1,100 people in India, America and South Korea about their dreams, the <i>Journal of Personality and Social Psychology</i> reported.
In the first experiment, they surveyed 149 university students about their general beliefs on dreams, and found an overwhelming majority of the subjects endorsed the theory that dreams reveal hidden truths about themselves and the world.
In the second experiment, the researchers surveyed 182 commuters at a Boston train station asking them to imagine one of four possible scenarios had happened the night before a scheduled airline trip.
The national threat level was raised to orange, indicating a high risk of terrorist attack; they consciously thought about their plane crashing; they dreamed about a plane crash; or a real plane crash occurred on the route they planned to take.
A dream of a plane crash was more likely to affect travel plans than either thinking about a crash or a warning, and the dream of a plane crash produced a similar level of anxiety as did an actual crash, the researchers found.
In the third experiment, 270 men and women from across the US took a short online survey in which they were asked to remember a dream they had about a person they knew.
People ascribed more importance to pleasant dreams about a person they liked as compared to a person they did not like, while they were more likely to consider an unpleasant dream more meaningful if it was about a person they disliked.
Morewedge of Carnegie Mellon University said, "In other words, people attribute meaning to dreams when it corresponds with their pre-existing beliefs and desires. This was also the case in another experiment which demonstrated that people who believe in God were likely to consider any dream in which God spoke to them to be meaningful - agnostics considered dreams in which God spoke to be more meaningful commanded them to take a pleasant vacation."
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