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Have you heard of dream studies? Worldwide there are several institutes and Universities (in Canada, Japan, Germany, USA to name a few) where researchers examine people’s dreams. If you want to join the studies, there are huge dream data bases online allowing you to search and analyze. 

1181 dreamers were interviewed by Canadian researchers in Montreal who compared these results with the relevant studies of other dream bank: 80% dream regularly of pursuit, 76% often have dreams with sexual context, 73% report about regular flight/fall dreams. 

Other frequent themes of dreams are violence, circumvention (missed the plain or train), exams or death of dear people. Interestingly these results overlap with the similar study from Japan in 1956, says Professor Tore Nielsen from “Dream And Nightmare Laboratory” in Montreal. Obviously culture does not matter much in this regard!  

The most mysterious dreams are “flying-dreams”: why do we dream of something we never actually do? Nobody knows why we dream of flying but there are some suggestions like for example, it`s an echo of an evolutionary choice to fly or to walk which people did not take; some mystical explanation goes for flying as a collective symbol of a soul (a bird serves as a soul-symbol in many cultures). 

Women dream different!   Not a big surprise but still remarkable – women dream much less violence. German researches from Mannheim evaluated thousands of interviews in 1956 -2000 and found out that today women dream about their jobs as seldom as in the fifties (men often dream about situations connected with work); they have more often sad dreams, and a very special female scenario is a disastrous wedding! 

The worst nightmare ever A huge number of people report about the same type of a nightmare: as if an evil spirit or some negative power sits on the chest blocking the breathing, even after the person wakes up he/she has a difficulty to breath. Canadian researchers in Waterloo University collected about 28 000 dreams of that kind!  

Political differences Is there any connection between political preferences and dreams? An American psychiater Kelly Bulkeley of “Dream Study Program” of the Kennedy University in USA found a curious correlation:Republicans often dream nightmares being themselves victims of violence and pursuit; the dreams of democrats are often weird, surreal, and illogical. A highly strange sign: women sympathizing with the right-wing dream often about becoming unwillingly pregnant. 

Children dream different? Children - contrary to the common view – do not have more nightmares than the adults. Small children behave passive in their dreams, witnessing the things happen. Only at the school age children become pro-active in their dreams. Some interesting gender differences: small girls report about their dream-talks with girl-friends and boys – about playing ball. But no matter a girl or a boy, children often dream about animals!

Article in “PM Fragen und Antworten”, reviewed and translated by axinia