Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 21, Issue 4, December 2012, Pages 1695-1702
Consciousness and Cognition

Dream recall frequency: Impact of prospective measures and motivational factors

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2012.08.011Get rights and content

Abstract

Significant individual differences exist in dream recall frequency (DRF) but some variance is likely attributable to instrument choice in measuring DRF. Three hundred and fifty eight participants estimated their weekly DRF and recorded their dreams in either a narrative log (n = 165) or checklist log (n = 193) for 2–5 weeks. There was an early peak in DRF within the first week of both types of prospective logs after which DRF remained relatively stable. Although the two groups did not differ in their estimated DRF, significantly fewer dreams were reported per week on the narrative logs and only checklist logs yielded significantly higher DRF than participants’ questionnaire estimates. The interactions between DRF measures did not vary across groups with low, medium or high baseline levels of DRF. Keeping a dream log does not necessarily increase DRF and narrative logs’ time consuming nature can impact subjects’ motivation to report all of their dreams over time.

Highlights

► We examine dream recall frequency with different instruments. ► Dream recall is greater using checklist logs than narrative logs. ► Checklist logs yield greater dream recall than participants’ questionnaire estimates. ► High dream recallers may not report all remembered dreams. ► Keeping a dream log does not necessarily increase dream recall.

Introduction

Dream recall frequency (DRF) is one of the most studied variables in dream research (Beaulieu-Prevost and Zadra, 2007a, Cohen, 1974, Goodenough, 1991, Schredl, 2007). Although dreaming is presumed to occur nightly in virtually all human adults (De Gennaro et al., 2012, Domhoff, 2011), vast individual differences exist in the frequency and constancy of people’s DRF. This significant variability is particularly salient when DRF is investigated either with questionnaires or prospective dream logs (Cohen, 1974, Watson, 2003).

Variability in DRF has been explored in relation to a wide range of variables (Beaulieu-Prevost and Zadra, 2007b, Belicki, 1987, Blagrove and Pace-Schott, 2010, Schredl and Montasser, 1996a, Schredl and Montasser, 1996b, Schredl et al., 2003) including gender (Schredl & Reinhard, 2008b) broadly defined trait factors such as visual memory (Cory et al., 1975, Schredl et al., 1995), attitude towards dreams (Beaulieu-Prevost and Zadra, 2005, Beaulieu-Prevost and Zadra, 2007a), creativity (Schechter, Schmeidler, & Staal, 1965), absorption (Beaulieu-Prevost and Zadra, 2007a, Watson, 2003) as well as state factors such as stress (Armitage, 1992, Pagel et al., 1995), sleep duration (Schredl & Reinhard, 2008a) and sleep stage prior to awakening (Nielsen, 2000). The association between DRF and these variables, however, can be affected by the method used to actually measure DRF. For instance, one meta-analysis (Beaulieu-Prevost & Zadra, 2007a) of studies having examined the relationship between DRF and various personality dimensions found that personality scores were not related to prospectively measured DRF per se, but rather to people’s tendency to retrospectively underestimate or overestimate their dream recall.

Although questionnaire items assessing people’s retrospective estimates of DRF constitute one of the more frequently used measure of DRF, daily prospective logs are generally viewed as more direct and valid indices of global DRF as well as of specific types of dreams such as nightmares (Levin and Nielsen, 2007, Robert and Zadra, 2008). With rare exceptions (Cohen, 1969) though, measures of retrospectively estimated DRF show positive correlations with prospective indices of DRF, with coefficients ranging between .33 and .69 (Baekeland, 1970, Beaulieu-Prevost and Zadra, 2005, Belcher et al., 1972, Cohen and Wolfe, 1973, Cohen, 1979, Hill et al., 1997, Rochlen et al., 1999, Schredl, 2002, Watson, 2003). However, subjects’ prospective home logs generally yield higher DRF than their questionnaire based estimates (Baekeland, 1970, Cohen, 1969, Cohen and Wolfe, 1973, Cory et al., 1975, Redfering and Keller, 1974). The magnitude of this difference varies considerably across studies with some reporting log based DRF 3–10 times greater than subjects’ retrospective estimates (Cohen, 1969, Redfering and Keller, 1974) and one study (Schredl, 2002) failing to observe notable differences across their sample.

A closer examination of these findings reveals that participants’ baseline level of dream recall, as measured retrospectively through questionnaire self-report, plays a role in the results obtained. Specifically, subjects who estimate having a high level of dream recall obtain equivalent (Cory et al., 1975) or even lower (Schredl, 2002) prospective log-based DRF whereas self described low recallers tend to obtain greater log-based DRF when compared to their retrospective estimates. One’s baseline level of DRF thus appears to act as a moderating variable in the relation between retrospective and prospective measures of DRF. One explanation for this finding resides in the attention-focus hypothesis of dream recall which suggests that keeping a dream log augments DRF in low recallers by increasing the attention they pay to their dreams, whereas a ceiling effect prevents a similar augmentation in high recallers (Beaulieu-Prevost and Zadra, 2007a, Cory et al., 1975, Schredl, 2002).

That keeping a dream log increases dream recall is often reported as an established fact (e.g., Parker et al., 2000, Wittmann et al., 2006). However, it is not clear to what extent differences between prospective and retrospective DRF are due to increased DRF when keeping a log, an underestimation of retrospective self-reports, or a combination of both. The suggestion that keeping a dream log increases dream recall can be tested empirically as the longitudinal nature of dream logs reveals fluctuations in DRF over time. According to the attention-focus model of dream recall, the increased attention given to one’s dreams resulting from keeping a dream log steadily increases participants’ DRF until a ceiling effect is attained. However, Schredl (2001) noted a significant decrease in subjects’ log based DRF from the study’s first week to the second. Similarly, one study (Bernstein & Belicki, 1995) in which participants twice completed 2 week long logs a few months apart found that the mean number of nights with dream recall decreased significantly from the first 2 weeks to the last two. By contrast, studies based on logs of 4, 8, 12 (Schredl & Fulda, 2005) and 14 (Watson, 2003) week duration found that DRF remained relatively stable over these extended periods. These differences may be partially due to the fact that subjects in the shorter 2 week studies were required to provide a complete written transcript of each dream recalled (narrative logs) whereas participants in the longer 4–14 week studies only had to indicate if they recalled a dream without providing actual dream content (checklist log). Furthermore, subjects’ baseline DRF level was not taken into account.

Taken together, these findings raise two important issues. First, contrary to the predictions derived from the attention-focus view of dream recall, DRF does not necessarily increase with the completion of daily logs, but can remain stable or even decrease over time. Second, the decrease in dream recall observed in some studies suggests that participants’ level of motivation over time may also impact the DRF obtained prospectively. In fact, the decrease in DRF observed when using more demanding narrative logs (Bernstein and Belicki, 1995, Schredl, 2001) as opposed to the stable DRF found with the quickly completed checklist logs (Schredl & Fulda, 2005) suggests that the greater time investment needed to complete narrative logs negatively affects subjects’ willingness to write out all of their remembered dreams over time. However, narrative and checklist logs have not been systematically compared to clarify the extent to which prospectively assessed DRF may vary between such instruments over time and in comparison to baseline DRF.

Section snippets

Aims and hypotheses

The overall aim of the present study was to help fill this research gap by comparing indices of DRF obtained prospectively using narrative as well as checklist logs in conjunction with questionnaire self-reports. Our first objective was to test the prediction that DRF obtained from narrative logs decreases over time while DRF from checklist logs remains stable. To further refine this research question, the mean dream report length (i.e., word count) of the dreams reported by participants in the

Participants

Participants were students recruited as nonpaid volunteers from the same undergraduate psychology class over a 6-year period. They were told that the study concerned the relation between dreams and measures of personality and well-being and that we were interested in both high and low dream recallers and in all types of dreams. Participants interested by the study were provided with the required materials and detailed instructions at the beginning of their class. Five hundred and ninety-three

Results

One hundred and thirteen participants (23.6%) were excluded from the analyses as their log duration was less than 15 days. Eight other subjects were excluded as they gave non-quantitative answers (e.g., “many” or “over 10”) for the their retrospective estimate of dream recall. The results presented are thus based on 358 participants (317 females; 41 males, M age = 22.9 ± 5.2 years), 165 of which completed a narrative log (46%) and 193 a checklist log (54%). As no significant differences in either

Discussion

The main objective of the present study was to investigate the impact of keeping a narrative or checklist dream diary on DRF. Our first prediction that DRF obtained from narrative logs would decrease over time while DRF from checklist logs would remain stable was partially confirmed. Similarly, there was evidence to support the idea that the actual length of dreams reported in narrative logs decreases over time with dreams collected during the third time window being approximately 25% shorter

Conclusions

This study systematically compared DRF obtained with narrative and checklist prospective logs of at least 2 weeks’ duration and retrospectively estimated DRF. Our results indicate that checklist dream logs yield higher prospective DRF than narrative logs, that significant differences between retrospective and prospective DRF are limited to checklist logs, and that prospectively measured DRF tends to peak at the beginning of the log and then remain stable over time. Thus, contrary to popular

Acknowledgment

Research supported by a grant to A. Zadra from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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