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Following the pioneering works of Freud (1955) and Jung (1960) on dreams, much scientific light has been thrown on the world of the unconscious by researchers in the developed nations. The dream life of the peoples of the developing nations remains largely unexplored. Reports on systematic studies of dreams from Nigeria have mainly concerned the experience of psychiatric patients (Ilechukwu 1985, 1989; Ohaeri 1993). Ekeh's report (Ekeh 1972) involved an analysis of the examination dreams of Nigerian students. Okoro (Unpublished thesis, 1988) examined aggressive and sexual themes in the manifest dream content of students who held extreme religious beliefs. These reports have shown that the Nigerian African, regardless of his or her level of sophistication, has a rich unconscious life through which a lot can be gleaned to throw more scientific light on the universal phenomenon of dreams.
Our study was aimed at highlighting the pattern of dreams of a cohort of Nigerians, the conditions thought to increase the frequency of dreams, the psychosocial factors that affect various aspects of the phenomenon of dreams, the manifest content of their dreams, and the interpretation they give to their dreams.
Respondents were sampled from among undergraduates of the University of Ibadan Faculty of Social Sciences (244 subjects) and from goverment workers at the State Ministry of Health and the Engineering Workshop of the University College Hospital, Ibadan (187