Does Everybody Dream?

While most of us can recall dreams at least occasionally, there is a sizeable minority of people who claim never to dream, and who understandably have some difficulty understanding what everybody else is talking about. Laboratory experiments, comparing dreamers with non-dreamers, have shown that mere is little difference between these groups in respect of EEG/EOG patterns while asleep (Antrobus et al., 1964; Goodenough et al., 1959). In all subjects there is the same orderly sequence of sleep stages, with REM sleep periods recurring at about 90-minute intervals throughout the night. Non-dreamers, however, tend to spend slightly less time in REM sleep than dreamers. Does their failure to recall dreams upon waking up in the morning mean that they really do not dream, or do they merely fail to remember having them?

In order to address this issue, Goodenough et al. (1959) scored 60 subjects on the frequency with which they remembered dreaming. They then persuaded the eight highest scorers, who 'dreamed every night', and the eight lowest scorers, who dreamt less than once a month, to submit to laboratory recordings and awakenings during the night. When woken from REM sleep, the self-reported dreamers reported dreams on almost every occasion (44 of the 49 awakenings), and also reported dreams on about half the occasions when they were woken from non-REM sleep. The non-dreamers reported dreams on less than half the occasions when woken from REM sleep (19 out of 42), and only seven times in 43 awakenings from non-REM sleep. REM sleep is thus even more clearly associated with dreaming in so-called 'non-dreamers' than in regular dreamers, who tend to report dreaming whenever they are woken up!

Experiments have also revealed that, while awakening people from REM sleep regularly produces reports of dreaming, delaying the awakening until after the end of the REM sleep period produces a dramatic drop in the number of dreams recalled. Even while asleep, we tend to forget our dreams as soon as they are over. People who claim that they generally do not dream, when woken from REM sleep do in fact report dreams, but they are particularly prone to forgetting them - if woken after the REM period is over, they recall even fewer instances of dreaming than those who claim regularly to recall dreams in the morning (Antrobus et al., 1964).

The Goodenough study described above generally supported these findings, and it was also noticed that non-dreamers tended to report that they had already been awake and thinking when woken from REM sleep (Goodenough et al., 1959). When their reports of what they had been thinking about were examined, it was found that these were frequently bizarre, commonly involved complex stories with visual imagery and, as far as the experimenters were concerned, were indistinguishable from dream reports. These subjects may therefore have been having the same sorts of experience as dreamers, but did not label their REM sleep experiences as 'dreams', but as 'thinking'. It seems that while everybody does dream during REM sleep, most dreams are forgotten and some people forget more readily than others.