How to provoke a dream enthusiast

Publish an article in the New York Times about dreams. Looking in the Times archives, it looks like that happens twice a year to twice a quarter.

John Tierney's What Do Dreams Mean? Whatever Your Bias Says was sent to me by Anya and served as the object of a lively discussion among my dream group.

One thing I really appreciated was the piece included a link to the source paper's pdf. For your convenience, the paper is here.

What kind of surprised me, and pleased me in a funny recognizing sort of way, is seeing a journal that wasn't Sleep or Dreaming or Jungian, or at least something clinical and therapeutic, but JPSP - the journal I came to know and fly toward in my preparation for the publish or perish path I didn't really end up taking.

So I plowed in.

Into the researchjournalspeak and the very lovely charts and path models.

What struck me is that the paper is more benign than what was in the Times and seems less about dreams and more about judgement.

First, people tend to believe that dreams contain meaningful information or reveal hidden truths.

Next, dreams impact judgement.

Also, pre-existing beliefs impact how meaningful dreams are considered.

Yeah, okay - so? These things make sense, and aren't all that provocative.

Something did strike me, though. I noticed was that the participants were laypeople - which is great for generalizability of the research results - but there are some extra things to know about your average person-on-the-street ...

In general, people who are at a distance from the whole dream scene, tend to:
- believe dreams are weird, bizarre, woo-woo, or spooky
- be most familiar with pop culture's version of Freud and Jung
- be most likely to go straight to a published dream dictionary for a given meaning

They are less likely to look curiously and open-heartedly at dream material, assume it's not presented to tell them what they already know, and ask open-ended questions about layers of meaning the material might have.

I'm here to change that :)