Continuity: Knowing each other, emotional closeness, and appearing together in dreams.

Continuity between entities in dreams and those in waking life arises from memory. In broad terms, the people a dreamer knows are associated in the dreamer ’s memory, and during dreaming people associated in memory tend to occur together in dreams. To obtain details, we gave a dreamer a questionnaire about whether pairs of major people know each other in waking life, and if so, how emotionally close they are. The greater the emotional closeness of a pair, the more likely the pair was to occur in a dream together. The more often a pair co-occurred in a dream, the more likely the pair was to know each other in waking life. In waking life, relationships with kin decay more slowly than relationships with others. A consequence would be that over tim e, as new friends replace the old, kin tend to become associated with many people. We found that in waking life, those who knew the most others were family members. People who occurred with the most other people in dreams were also family members. As relationships decay over time, memory for the rel ationships degrades as well. To maintain memories, we propose that associations between people in memory are refreshed when people are dreamed about together. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Source: Dreaming - December 21, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Han, Hye Joo; Schweickert, Richard Source Type: research