Waking and dreaming mentation: a test of their interrelationship.

The relationship of dream content to the immediate pre- and post-sleep mentation of the dreamer was studied using the electrophysiologically defined state of REM (rapid eye movement sleep) as dream collection time. The subjects were 20 male and 20 female volunteers, ages 18 to 25. Each slept for three non-consecutive nights in the laboratory and had REM awakenings and pre- and post-sleep verbal content collected. REM reports and waking verbal samples were scored on 18 Hall-Van de Castle content scales. The interscorer agreement of two judges was 0.90. Product moment correlations were performed on each of the 18 content categories between content of the REM reports and of the waking verbal samples. Across all 40 subjects, 9 out of 18 correlations were statistically significant and 14 of the 18 were positive. The zero-mu test indicated that the distribution of the 18 correlations was significantly different from zero. Thus it can be concluded that dream content is related to the psychological parameters of waking life, in a continuous rather than compensatory manner.