Gender Differences in the Dream Content of Children and Adolescents: The UK Library Study

Although gender differences in the dreams of adults have been studied extensively, large-scale studies in children and adolescents are scarce. The UK Library Study collected 1,995 most recent dreams of children and adolescents. Boys reported more physical aggression and fewer female characters in their dreams, whereas indoor settings were more prominent in girls’ dreams, results that are consistent with the findings in adults and the continuity hypothesis of dreaming. The study indicates that dream content analysis is a valuable tool for studying the inner world of children and adolescents because dreams reflect their waking life experiences, thoughts, and concerns. It would be informative to include measures of waking life aggression, frequency of social contacts, and leisure time activities to provide evidence for direct links between waking and dreaming.

Different Factors Affect Different Aspects of Dream Recall

Dream recall is naturally a prerequisite for eliciting dream content. Therefore it is of importance to study factors (e.g., personality traits) that might affect dream recall because these factors might bias the content analytic findings in the field of dream research. The present findings indicate that different aspects of dream recall (dream recall frequency, dream recall detail, long-term dream memory) are affected by different factors or at least in different magnitudes by the same factors (e.g., imagination). Whether these variables have a confounding effect on dream content analytic findings using different sampling methods (most recent dreams, diary dreams, and laboratory dreams) is poorly understood, but the present results clearly indicate that there is a need for systematic research in this area in order to increase the representativeness of content analytic findings.

Sex differences in dream aggression

Dream research shows sex differences in dream aggression that fit very well with the findings for waking-life aggressive behaviour. Dream studies are a valuable tool for investigating variables underlying the sex difference in aggression. One might argue that studying dream aggression might be even more promising because aggression in dreams is not socially labelled, as being aggressive in waking life is.