Anxiety and the content of dreams

Abstract

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in the relationships between dream content and the personality characteristics of the dreamer. While studies in this area have generally supported the assumption that personality variables exercise a controlling or constraining influence on the material that appears in dreams, much work remains to be done before the nature of these controls or constraints is understood. A survey of the literature in which the relationships between personality characteristics and the manifest content of dreams are investigated reveals a variety of classification systems for the content analysis of dreams. It has only been through the application of content analysis to dreams, as it is applied to other verbal or symbolic material , that quantitative measures have been obtained, allowing the relationships between dreaming and other human behaviour to be determined.