According to the results of a new study, lucid dreaming is a reality in the lives of many, many people.  In a survey of nearly 3000 American adults, 64.9% of the participants reported having a dream in which they were aware of dreaming, and 34.4% said they have experienced the ability to control what happens in their dreams.

This evidence suggests that lucid dreaming is not just a Hollywood fantasy or a fringe practice of new age mystics.  Rather, the capacity for conscious awareness and/or volitional control within the dream state turns out to be a surprisingly widespread phenomenon among ordinary Americans.

The new study was conducted on my behalf in May 2010 by Zogby Interactive among 2992 American adults randomly selected to complete an online survey on their sleep and dream patterns.  A more detailed analysis of the survey results will be released in the fall.  For now, these are the initial findings about lucid dreaming:

• Overall, 64.9% of the respondents answered yes to the question, “Have you ever had a dream of being aware you are dreaming?”; 24.8% said no, and 10.3% were not sure.
• Women answered yes more often than men did, and younger people more than older people.
• Political liberals and Democrats answered yes more often than did political conservatives and Republicans.
• Overall, 34.4% of the respondents answered yes to the question, “Have you ever had a dream of being able to control a dream?”; 51.1% said no, and 14.5% were not sure.
• A similar gender pattern appeared, with more women than men and younger than older people answering yes to this question.
• People who never attend religious worship services seemed to give an especially high proportion of yes answers to the control-your-dreams question.  So did people who say they are more spiritual than religious.

These findings add new data to the growing literature on lucid dreaming (for more, see the work of Jayne Gackenbach, Stephen LaBerge, Tracey Kahan, Fariba Bogzaran, and Ryan Hurd) and expand our knowledge of its correlations with various demographic factors.

Like other dream-themed movies (Dreamscape (1984), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), The Matrix (1999)), Inception is trying to tap into people’s personal experiences with lucid dreaming to simulate a sense of intense realism, aesthetic wonder, and infinite possibility.

The more Inception can recreate the feelings of this paradoxical state of conscious dreaming, the more the audience will be drawn into the story, and the more, perhaps, they will be reminded of their own dreaming potentials.

Methodology:

These results come from a Zogby Interactive survey of 2992 American adults, answering a series of questions about their sleep and dream patterns in May 2010.  The participants were randomly chosen from a panel of @500,000 people available for online opinion research who were originally contacted by Zogby during a random digit dialing telephone survey.

According to the March 2010 report on online panels conducted by the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the key issue in evaluating online polling is whether a truly random, probability-based method is used to recruit participants, otherwise the results cannot be considered statistically representative of a broader population.  As I understand Zogby’s method, it satisfies this requirement.

Public opinion researchers are actively debating the advantages and disadvantages of online surveys in comparison to traditional telephone surveys.  For this project, the online approach had the decisive advantage of enabling the participants to provide first-person narrative reports of their 1) most recent dream, 2) worst nightmare, and 3) earliest remembered dream.  Gathering this kind of data was not feasible using a telephone survey.

However, an online panel of participants is obviously skewed toward people who are computer-literate.  This might be a problem if the current project had a different goal, for example predicting election turn-out.  But since the goal here is to develop a better demographic profile of sleep and dream patterns, the Zogby panel has more than enough diversity to suit the purpose.

On the whole, it seems fair to conclude this data set provides a reasonably representative portrait of the sleep and dream patterns of contemporary American society.  Hopefully, bigger and better studies in the future will add more detail and depth to this portrait.  Until then, this survey appears to be the largest one yet undertaken on the demographics of sleep and dream patterns.

The results cited above have been weighted according to Zogby’s standard calculations for matching the demographics of the 2992 participants with the demographics of American society as a whole.  My future work with this material, while considering the weighted results, will focus primarily on analyzing the raw data.

The questions used in this survey were drawn in part from the Typical Dreams Questionnaire used by Nielsen et al. (2003) in their article in the journal Dreaming (13:4, 211-236) about the typical dreams of Canadian University students.

It could be argued these questions are too vague—a “yes” answer could mean it’s happened only once in the person’s whole life, or it happens for them every night.  For that reason, the results here should be regarded cautiously as indicating the minimum occurrence of these types of dreams.

Another concern is that these questions allow for confabulated memories influenced by social expectations—people may answer yes if they feel it’s the kind of dream a person in their society should have experienced, whether or not they have actually had that kind of dream themselves.  Such a possibility should be taken seriously.  Most forms of opinion research are limited by the difficulty of verifying subjective self-reports and eliminating external influences.

In this project, the approach has been to gather a large number of reports from a wide variety of people and then analyze them in terms of clear, easy-to-identify patterns in the data.  This method assumes that such broad, empirically-based patterns are honest and accurate reflections of people’s actual dream experiences.

The 10 members of the “dreamers focus group”

Elizabeth is a fifty-eight year old hospital technician from Kentucky who has overcome the challenges posed by two divorces, several alcoholic family members, breast cancer and chemotherapy, and a number of other serious medical conditions requiring surgery.  She considers herself a “survivor.”  For many years she has been energetically involved in the activities of her local Disciples of Christ Church community.  Elizabeth’s a registered Democrat who says she’s very liberal in her political beliefs, although she favors more freedom for gun owners and voted for George W. Bush in 2004.

Kip is a fifty-two year old ranch manager and horse trainer from Northern California.  Twenty years ago she took her seventeen-month old baby and left her second husband to form a new family with her partner Janet, a local sheriff.  They’ve been together ever since, and Kip’s daughter just graduated from college.  Raised in a strict Catholic family, Kip is now very independent spiritually and laughingly considers herself a member of the “church of the living hoof.”  She’s a Democratic voter who detests President Bush, although in general she’s not much interested in partisan politics.  Her views used to be more liberal, but today she says she’s “hardened up a bit,” and if anything considers herself a political moderate.

Two married couples are included in the group of ten participants.  The first of these couples went through an incredibly harrowing series of life challenges during the year of their journal-keeping.  Dan is a thirty-six year old Army Special Forces sergeant, a career soldier approaching the twenty-year retirement mark.  He left for his third tour in Iraq during the journal-keeping year.  Raised Catholic, he is politically conservative and believes the U.S. is engaged in a difficult but necessary long-term battle to “plant the seeds of democracy” in the Arab world.

Dan has been married for five years to Sophia, a thirty-one year old who takes care of their preschool-age daughter in their home on the outskirts of Dan’s current base in North Carolina.  Sophia has always been an active dreamer, and in her local community she’s known as someone who’s available to talk about dreams.  She’s politically conservative and supportive of President Bush, but spiritually progressive in avoiding fundamentalist church-goers and seeking alternative, non-Christian sources of wisdom.  Soon after she began keeping her sleep and dream journal, and right after Dan received his latest deployment notice, Sophia discovered she was pregnant.  Her journal thus became a record of her sleep and dream experiences across the nine-month term of her pregnancy, the last half of which she spent alone while Dan fought in Iraq.

The remaining six members of this group are, or have been, residents of the same rural, economically-depressed county in Western New York.  Richard is a forty-eight year old hospital security manager who was born in Germany and immigrated with his family to the U.S. when he was one year old.  His views tend to be conservative both religiously and politically (he’s pro-Bush and pro-Iraq war).  He used to be registered as a Democrat but recently changed his affiliation to Republican.  Relatively short of stature, Richard has a black belt in karate and is the founder of a successful, all-volunteer animal rehabilitation clinic in his community.

Grace, a forty-six year old preschool teacher, is Richard’s wife.  She says she’s becoming increasingly conservative in her politics, and for the most part she supports President Bush, although she usually tries to pay as little attention to political current events as possible.  Raised as a Catholic, she is now more interested in Christian spirituality outside of formal church settings.  She and Richard have a nine-year old daughter whom they adopted as a baby, and whose well-being is the core concern of their lives.

Will is a twenty-six year old man who grew up in a town close to where Richard and Grace live.  He’s well educated, highly intelligent, and knowledgeable about a wide variety of subjects.  He’s had difficulty in school and work, though, due in part to a hand deformity and a history of emotional troubles.  Will is politically liberal and an avowed atheist—two qualities that further alienate him from the traditionalist mores of his conservative Catholic surroundings.

Paul is an eighty year old former Catholic priest who left his Franciscan order to marry an ex-nun.  They raised four children, then divorced; he remains on good terms with her, even though she remarried soon after they split.  Paul considers himself wiser now about religion than when he was a priest, and he leads a physically and socially active life.  A pro-Bush, pro-war Democrat, he is an avid viewer of Fox television news.

Lola is a 49-year old administrator at a retirement home.  Her life was scarred by a heart-rending tragedy ten years ago—in the heat of a family argument, one of her sons shot and killed her other son.  They were fourteen and eleven years old at the time.  The echoes of that awful fratricide continue to reverberate in her family, in her local community, and in her dreams.  Lola was raised Lutheran, though she does not currently attend church.  She prays regularly and considers spirituality to be immensely important in her life.  Politically she’s a conservative Republican, though she’s sickened by the war (one of her nephews is in the Army, serving his first tour in Iraq) and she can’t bear to watch or listen to the news anymore.

Nadine is a 24-year old waitress living in Florida, engaged to be married and planning to move soon to Colorado.  Raised as a Catholic in the same Western New York region, Nadine recently moved away from home and is trying to start a new life on her own.  She hasn’t entirely rejected Catholicism, but she avoids organized religion in general, preferring to pursue her interests in Native American spiritual traditions. Her political views are mostly liberal (she worked for two years in Americorps, the youth volunteer program founded by Bill Clinton), although she is very upset that affirmative action policies limit the financial opportunities for “non-minority” people like her.

Dream series available for study

Five of the focus group dream series—those of Will, Paul, Grace, Lola, and Sophia—as well as collections of dreams of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are available for study at www.dreambank.net, along with dozens of other dream series gathered from other sources.  Instructions for performing easy word-search analyses of these dreams can be found by clicking the website’s “help” button.

Dreams are crazy nonsense.

Response: Wrong.  Dreams are meaningful expressions of people’s most important concerns, activities, and beliefs in waking life.  Anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t paid attention to the last half-century of dream research.  For scientific evidence in favor of the “continuity hypothesis” see www.dreamresearch.net

Dream interpretation is Freudian foolishness.

Response: I’m using methods very different from Freudian psychoanalysis.  I start with broad, easily observable patterns in large collections of dreams, and then focus on particular dreams that can further illuminate those patterns.

The author is a leftwing nut job.

Response: True, I live near Berkeley, California.  I have a pony-tail and an androgynous name, and I’m a strong Obama supporter.  So what?  My book still provides a “fair and balanced” account of the political psychology of liberals and conservatives, highlighting the character virtues and weaknesses of each perspective, using methods that anyone can try for themselves.  Take a look at the brief biographies of the 10 members of the “dreamers focus group” and you’ll see the political diversity of the dream material presented in the book.

Limitations to my findings

Limits to the sleep and dream poll:

My friends in the social sciences have pointed out the many uncertainties that bedevil the use of simple statistics like these in arguing for broad psychological theories.  I share their concerns, which were well expressed by de Tocqueville: “When statistical method is not based upon rigorously accurate calculations, it leads to error rather than to guidance.  The mind easily allows itself to be deluded by the deceptive appearance of precision which statistics retain even when wrong and it relies confidently upon mistakes apparently clothed in the forms of mathematical truth” (Democracy in America, 255).  I fully recognize the limits of these data, but I’ll stand by the rigor and accuracy of my calculations regarding the sleep and dream patterns of contemporary Americans until other researchers come up with something better.

Limits to the dreamers focus group:

Without question, the lives of ten people can never be a perfect mirror of a nation of three hundred million.  Any research project that’s based on data from journals, interviews, and surveys runs the danger of over-generalization.  Although I tried to cast as wide a recruiting net as possible, these ten dream-journaling volunteers included no Hispanics or African-Americans, no one from the Midwest or deep South, no high-income professionals, no evangelical Christians, no Jews or Muslims.  Any claims made in this book must be qualified by those limitations.  Still, these ten particular people’s lives embody so many of the challenges facing the country today that it’s fair to view them as representing other Americans with similar experiences and convictions.  We can’t learn everything from this group, but we can learn a lot.

Religious Attendance x Sleep

Religious Attendance x Dream Prototypes

Chapter 3 discusses these findings in relation to the religious and spiritual dimensions of the dreams of the journal keepers. For more on dreaming and religion generally, see Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History.