From adolescence to young adulthood in two dream series: The consistency and continuity of characters and major personal interests.

Based on several past studies of lengthy daily individual dream series, which are an unobtrusive, nonreactive archival measure, free of any demand characteristics, it has been established with adults over age 25 that dream content is consistent over years and even decades. In addition, dream content is often continuous with waking personal concerns as well, whether the concerns are positive (“interests,” “avocations”) or negative (“worries,” “preoccupations”; Domhoff, 2018, Chapters 3–4, for summaries of this work). The study presented in this article is a descriptive empirical investigation that explores the question of if and when consistency and continuity can be found in the teenage years or young adulthood. It is based primarily on individual dream series kept by 2 young women from early adolescence to young adulthood. They do not know each other and did not separately think about providing their dream reports to researchers until they were in their mid-20s. The analyses of these 2 series, one containing 4,329 dream reports, and the other containing 664 dream reports, are based on a quantitative word-search methodology, available through DreamBank.net. The resulting personalized word strings for each series combine the rigor of defined content categories with the speed and perfect reliability of computerized word searches. The findings on consistency and continuity during adolescence are similar to the earlier findings for adults. (PsycInfo Database Rec...
Source: Dreaming - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research