Ego modalities in the manifest dreams of male and female Chicanos.

Abstract

When the manifest dreams of young adult male and female Chicanos were examined through an inventory which captures the dream content and pattern, striking differences between male and female dreams were found in the areas of setting, characters, interaction, self, instinctual modalities, and realism. Generally speaking, the men's internal psychic world, as viewed through their dreams, tended to be organized around a highly visible and demarcated self seen as robustly active, randomly in motion, and often contentiously involved with unrelated others. The confines of this internal world were sketched in as broad, but were occupied by boundaries and barriers and were often subject to unpredictable events. In contrast, the women's internal world contained a relatively less sharply defined and less robustly active self, but also a less contentious self with a greater range of interactions with more, and more familiar characters. Narrower confines were matched by less emphasis on boundaries, greater predictability, and more goal-directed locomotion.