Dreaming About One’s Own Children: An Online Survey

Abstract

Social interactions with close persons are very important and one would expect – according to the continuity hypothesis of dreaming – that the dreamer's own children would show up in dreams quite frequently. So far the extent to which dreams include the dreamer’s own children has not been studied systematically. Overall, 1695 persons (960 women, 735 men; age mean: 53.84 ± 13.99 years) completed an online survey that included questions about dreams and waking-life experiences with their children. The findings indicate parents dream about their children in 17% of the remembered dreams, whereas participants without children only dream about having fictive children in the dream in less than 3% of all their recalled dreams. Results indicate that average emotional tone of the dreams with their own children was positive, but dreams might also focus on conflicts and worries as the mean emotional tone within dreams was less positive that the mean estimates of the emotional tone of the waking-life relationship. This first study on the frequency with which a dreamer’s own children appear in their dreams is a starting point to take a closer look at the way the parent-child relationship is reflected in dreams.

Interactions with family members in students’ dreams.

“…Similar to Hall and Van de Castle (1966) and the dream series depicted in Table 1, we found that mothers occurred more often in dreams than fathers—perfectly reflecting the literature demonstrating that the mother is more often described as primary caregiver (Hartnett et al, 2018) and young adults have more contact with their mothers compared with their fathers (Fingerman et al, 2016). One study (Schredl et al, 2021) showed that fathers, on the other hand, also dream less often about their children than mothers do. As parents occurred more frequent in the dreams than siblings, it would be interesting to investigate whether this difference is also reflecting waking-life social patterns, that is, that young adults have more intense relationships with their parents than with their sibling(s).…”

“…This fits with the findings, that young adults have more contact with their mother than with the father (Fingerman et al, 2016) and the mother is more often described as primary caregiver (Hartnett et al, 2018). Interestingly, fathers also dream less often about their children than mothers (Schredl et al, 2021). Female family members are more intensely engaged in maintaining contact within the family (Lee et al, 1993); this is reflected in the higher percentage of dreams including parents in female students compared with male students (Table 1).…”

“…The continuity hypothesis postulates a continuity between our dreams and waking life (Schredl, 2018b); especially emotionally intense waking-life experiences (Malinowski & Horton, 2014; Schredl, 2006) and close social relationships like romantic partners (Schredl, 2001; Schredl et al, 2020; Selterman & Drigotas, 2009; Selterman et al, 2014) and one’s own children (Schredl et al, 2021) are reflected in dreams. The high frequency of close persons within dreams is also predicted by social simulation theory (Revonsuo et al, 2015), postulating that dreaming of social interactions, especially those with close persons, is increasing social skills levels in waking life and had (maybe still have) an evolutionary benefit.…”

“…Given this impact of the core family on the person’s life, family members should occur—according to the continuity hypothesis of dreaming—quite often in dreams. Table 1 presents an overview over several content analytic studies on this topic, one study (Hall & Van de Castle, 1966) is based on a student sample, the other four studies (Domhoff, 2003; Schredl, 2013, 2021; Schweickert, 2007) are based on long dream series of individual adults. Overall, the findings indicate that core family members do occur quite often in dreams.…”

Clocks in Dreams: Analysis of a Long Dream Series

“…Even in the area of mobile phones, many individuals use clocks, e.g., in the sample ( N = 3084) of Montag et al [ 3 ], 45% of the participants regularly wore a wristwatch and 67% had an alarm clock for waking up in the morning. According to the continuity hypothesis of dreaming [ 4 , 5 ], we dream about topics that are important to us, e.g., family members [ 6 ], spouses [ 7 ], sexuality [ 8 ], our own children [ 9 ], pets [ 10 ] and work [ 11 ]. Given that punctuality and timekeeping is important (see above), the question arises as to how often clocks for measuring time occur in dreams.…”