Contents of day and night dreams of emotionally disturbed adolescents.

Abstract

Content analysis of “night,” “day,” and “repetitive” day dreams of three groups of adolescents has been attempted for the purpose of (a) empirical data collection, (b) classification, (c) achievement of quantitative measures useful for dream studies, and (d) correlation studies. There seem to be significant differences between the contents of day and night dreams in the patient and control population groups, although various degrees of positive correlation of the contents of daily preoccupations, emotions, and happenings with night dream contents in each subject and/or group of subjects do exist. The schizophrenic patients show striking differences in their dream reporting and contents compared to other clinical groups. Positive correlation between the themes of “repetitive day dreams” and “night dreams” in each subject is much greater in the inpatient group than in the other two groups.