Dream Recall and Political Ideology: Results of a Demographic Survey
An article with the title above just appeared in the IASD journal Dreaming, vol. 22(1), March 2012, pp. 1-9. It’s the latest in a series of research projects I began in 1992 on the interaction of politics and dreaming. The abstract for the new paper is below; links to the other projects are below that. All the data for the new project are available at the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb).
A brief report on the study just appeared in the “Week in Ideas” section of the Wall Street Journal.
The results of this new study are consistent with my previous findings suggesting that American liberals tend to be worse sleepers and more expansive dreamers than American conservatives, who tend to be better sleepers and relatively minimal dreamers.
Abstract: This report presents findings from a survey of 2992 demographically diverse American adults who answered questions about dream recall and questions about their political views. Participants who described themselves as “liberal” or “progressive” (n = 802) were compared to people who described themselves as “conservative” or “very conservative” (n = 1335). Previous studies have suggested that political liberals tend to have higher dream recall than political conservatives. The results of the present survey provide new evidence in support of this hypothesis. On all 11 questions asked about different types of dream recall, people on the left reported higher frequencies than people on the right. The same pattern was found when the two groups were divided by gender: Liberal males reported consistently higher dream recall than conservative males, as did liberal females compared to conservative females. These findings indicate that political ideology is at least one of the cultural factors influencing dream recall frequencies among American adults.
2002. Dream Content and Political Ideology. Dreaming, vol. 12(2), pp. 61-77.
1995. Political Dreaming: Dreams of the 1992 Presidential Election. In Among All These Dreamers: Essays on Dreaming and Modern Society (State University of New York Press).
