Dream a little dream of me...then share it for a more intimate relationship, suggests a new study published in the journal Dreaming.
We're not talking about your lifelong dream to run a marathon or manage your own small business. Those are certainly important, but researchers were interested more in how nightly dreams (you know, the ones with the Clooney cameos) influence perceived intimacy in couples.
So with a sample population of 667 adults, both single and not, researchers administered a questionnaire to see how often participants dreamt, how often they shared their dreams with a friend or partner, and how loved and secure they felt within their relationship.
The results? Women remembered and shared their dreams more often than men, and non-single women shared more than singles. While researchers did find a "small but significant" correlation between dream sharing and relationship intimacy, men were more behind this idea than women.
Why, then, do men share less? "I simply think that to many men, the idea that dream sharing could facilitate increased intimacy in the relationship is a very new thought and while answering the questionaire, this idea for the first time occurred to them," says lead study author Michael Rohde Olsen, a dream researcher at Lund University in Sweden. "An interesting study, therefore, would be to see whether the same men answering the questions have shared their dreams more often than before answering the questions."
Researchers speculate that women share dreams because it's fun and entertaining, and they also cite previous research that shows dream sharing is like sharing a special part of yourself. Thus the higher levels of intimacy.
If you're already writing this off because you "don't dream," know this: Unless you've suffered from a seizure or underwent brain surgery, says Olsen, you do dream. You're just not waking up during a rapid eye movement (REM) cycle, or the cycle of sleep where deep dreaming occurs. When you wake up during REM sleep, you're more likely to remember your dream than if you were to wake up during non-REM sleep. As we get older, the amount of time we spend in REM declines, but fortunately, it's possible to train yourself to remember your dreams, whether you wake up during REM or not.
Here are Olsen's four simple steps to start boosting both your recall and relationship today:
1. Before going to sleep, say to yourself you want to remember your dreams
2. Start documenting your dreams by writing them down or recording them in your smartphone
3. Actively work with your dreams by trying to understand their content
4. Believe that you do get something out of working with your dreams. There is so much to learn from them about what's going on inside you, Olsen says.
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