In an attempt to determine whether temporal references identified in dreams follow the same temporal distributions as those documented for autobiographical memories, 28 younger women (18-35 years of age) and 30 older women (60-77 years of age) kept a home dream diary for 1 week and then slept 1 night in the laboratory for rapid eye movement sleep dream collection. The following morning, they identified temporal references in their dreams and produced a sample of autobiographical memories using the semantic cuing method. For both groups, there was a linear decrease in temporal references identified in dreams and autobiographical memories with increased remoteness for the last 30 years. As predicted, for the older group, there were similar cubic trends reflecting a disproportionately higher number of both temporal references identified in dreams and autobiographical memories from adolescence/early adulthood compared with adulthood and childhood. The results support the notion of continuity between waking and dreaming memory processes.

In a small-scale study, Rados and Cartwright (1982) found that presleep thought samples, but not postsleep-elicited significant concems, could be matched with a night's REM dream content on a cross-participant basis. We collected either presleep thought samples or significant concerns for later blind judge matching with 8 participants' mentation reports from the night's first REM period over 8 nonconsecutive nights each. Although some persons' first-REM dreams were successfully identified by judges from presleep ideation, both vs. presleep ideation from the same person on other nights and vs. presleep ideation from other persons on the same night, there was no overall group pattern suggesting continuity of dream content with presleep ideation. We also did not replicate the claimed superiority of thought samples vis a vis significant concerns.Reliable content analysis showed a different proportional distribution of life experiences in waking and dream ideation.

Event descriptions (ED)from 6 different days and 6 corresponding morning dream reports (DR) were obtained from 13 participants. In a within-participant matching task, 14 untrained undergraduate student judges attempted to pair 6 EDs to 6 corresponding DRs for each of6 participants. In a between-participant matching task, the same judges attempted to match 6 EDsfrom different participants to their respective DRs. For the within-participant task, a significance testfor a single mean indicated that judges were llnable to match dreams to their corresponding daily events at better than chance levels. For the between-participant matching task, however, it appears that judges were able to make pairs at significant levels but were still making on average less than 2 out of the possible 6 pairs per item. In a ranking task, two different judges read 1 ED and 6 DRs and then ranked the dreams from I to 6, 1 being most likely to be related to the ED and 6 being the least likely. Statistical tests revealed that dreams did not obtain better ranks (closer to J) when they were the correct match than when they were not. These data appear to demonstrate that independent observers are unable to detect a clear resemblance between participants' daily events and manifest dream content.

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