Abstract
Correlations between memories and dreaming has typically been studied by linking conscious experiences and dream reports, which has illustrated that dreaming reflects waking life events, thoughts, and emotions. As some research suggests that sleep has a function of memory consolidation, and dreams reflect this, researching this relationship further may uncover more useful insights. However, most related research has been conducted using the self-report method which asks participants to judge the relationship between their own conscious experiences and dreams. This method may cause errors when the research purpose is to make comparisons between different groups, because individual differences cannot be balanced out when the results are compared among groups. Based on a knowledge of metaphors and symbols, we developed two operationalized definitions for independent judges to match conscious experiences and dreams, the descriptive incorporation and the metaphorical incorporation, and tested their reliability for the matching purpose. Two independent judges were asked to complete a linking task for 212 paired event-dreams. Results showed almost half dreams can be matched by independent judges, and the independent-judge method could provide similar proportions for the linking task, when compared with the self-report method.
Highlights
Memory consolidation refers to the stabilization and integration of information into long-term memory networks (Marr, 1970)
Metaphorical incorporation is the incorporation of conscious experiences into dreams in an indirect way, which is filled with symbolic expressions
Descriptive incorporation contained two ways for memories to be incorporated into dreams
Summary
Memory consolidation refers to the stabilization and integration of information into long-term memory networks (Marr, 1970). Matching Waking Events Into Dream Reports factors which increase the likelihood of a conscious experience appearing in dreams (review see Horton and Malinowski, 2015), such as an event’s emotional significance (e.g., Malinowski and Horton, 2014) and how recently it occurred (Blagrove et al, 2011; van Rijn et al, 2015) Building on these findings, Horton and Malinowski (2015) proposed an AM model to describe and explain the construction of dreams. If external judges look for emotions when linking conscious experiences with dreams, the independent-judge method may not be able to bring the same number of linkages as the self-report method, for which the dreamer can feel the correlation rather than analyze it This may cause a ‘floor effect’ which means independent judges could hardly recognize any correlations of events-dreams across all participants’ reports. In order to test their reliability, linking attempts were made by independent judges to enable a view
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