Do Dreams Reflect Experience in Real Life?

I cannot believe that three weeks of school have already passed by. I just realized that I have about two days to write my rough draft, so I have to get in some research. After the ambling invention exercise, I thought about why I chose to research about dreams. Honestly, it was the first thought in my head that had both a scientific aspect, a psychological theory, and a unique perspective since every individual’s dreams are always different. Also, there are many questions I can address. For example, the percentage of students who recall their dreams. How often do people get nightmares, and how do they react during their scary dream? Instead of asking students to take long traditional dream analysis assessment tests, I think that I can make a fun questionnaire. I can get my own statistics on how often college students get nightmares or dream about an upcoming exam by using an online survey tool. As I was reading through articles to narrow down topics for my research paper, I came across some interesting studies. I will save the details for my literature review (I do not want to spoil everything), but here are the topics.

I found a study about how students’ dream experiences can reflect their performance in public examinations. It was found that students who dreamt about their exam and were able to dream recall the night prior did have a higher grade. However, the content of the dream did not have a significant effect. Some of the research I found concluded that it is common to have negative anticipation in dreams because of a stressful event. Another article that correlates with this was a study report about the frequency, content, and emotional tone of erotic dreams based on German college students. Based on dream content, kissing was the most frequent erotic activity. The personality of the person dreaming and their social activity are all factors that play in what type of dream they will have. Then I thought about if covid or quarantine had an effect on people’s dreams. I found an article addressing that during the pandemic, a study had shown that females’ dreams were more aggressive than males.

So, I think it will be interesting to analyze studies done on college students since we are all in college. If you are reading this, maybe I can get your input on this topic. For example, do you think that dreams can reflect your performance on an exam? Or, if you fail your exam in your dream, will you pass the actual exam? Finally, do you think that your emotional tone (before you go to I sleep) will affect how “erotic” your dream will be? As you can see, there is a lot of different topics I can target about dreams. Although, I believe that my primary focus will be on how stress and dreams of college students can effect their exam scores. Also, to find out the dream content of college students before an exam.