Column Chronicles
 
Dreams can solve problems
 
 
Frank Cotolo
April 3, 2014
 
The answer to many of your problems, says a study done about many of your problems, may be revealed in your dreams. During sleep, your dreams may present solutions to difficulties you are having in your life within a week after the trouble starts, researchers say.
 
In a new study, 470 Canadian undergraduate psychology students never known for accomplishing any useable information in the past recorded their dreams for a week. They rated the dreams based on how well they recalled them, as well as the dreams' intensity, emotions and impact and ignoring any dream including water, sex, sex with water, drinking water, waterfalls, sex at a waterfalls or Spanish sailors.
 
The next week, participants took a closer look at recent, well-recalled dreams. After that, two independent judges - their names kept in a sealed envelope until the end of the study, at which time the envelope was opened and everyone admitted they had never heard of either man - were called in. Their job was to review the selected dreams and related events and decide if they contained solutions to problems.
 
The conclusion is that dreams try to offer solutions to personal problems. The result, however, did not cover people whose dreams related to other people's problems.
 
"I had a dream," said one student, that my brother should change his job. I told my brother, he changed his job and was hit by a truck the next day."
 
"The dream world sometimes works quickly," said one researcher. "Dreams are always churning insights and advice the night after a triggering event, although they do so with symbols, metaphors and allegories that make no sense at the time."
 
"This suggests an ongoing effort to resolve a problem in dreams during the week following the emergence of that problem," said psychology professor Don Diego Fortissimo of the University of Zorro.
 
"Something is going on in the mind that may alter the resolutions people may need," says Fortissimo, who worked on the study while selling pretzels from an outdoor stand in Toronto.
 
The solutions that surfaced after a week of study were especially significant for women.
 
For instance, women up to age 39 seem to recall dreams more often than men of the same age, unless the dream takes place while watching the Cooking Channel. Women are more likely to remember their dreams after experiencing stress connected to using power tools and women describe their dreams as vivid, while most men say all they recall is being chased by stick figures. Dream content also tends to be different between men and women, say the researchers, in that women's dreams take place in rooms with more furniture.
 
Frank Cotolo can be found hosting the talk and interview programme Cotolo Chronicles. You can send him an e-mail at this address: frank@148.ca.

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