Differential Recall of the Dream as a Function of Audience Perception

The growing salience of studies of dreams in the fields of psychotherapy and personality makes it important for us to examine the nature of our dream data. Recent research on dreams has made it increasingly possible that dreams may be as important to health as is sleeping. The average person, it has been suggested, needs and experiences an average of three to seven dreams during a night's sleep.1 Most people, whether they are in or out of a psychotherapy treatment situation, do not remember more than a tiny proportion of their dreams. The dreams which they experience but do not remember may be repressed or kept from awareness in a variety of ways.

One recent study concluded that the eye movement periods which seem to be associated with dreaming occurred as frequently for a group of nondreamers as for a group of dreamers, suggesting the possibility that each group dreamed as frequently as the other, but there were differential factors affecting remembering and reporting of the dreams.3 Another study documented how the “forgotten” dream which is “remembered” serves specific psychodynamic function for the dreamer.5

Our corpus of knowledge about dreams is thus probably based on dreams which patients or other recall because their recollection serves some purpose of the dreamer's waking life. We should like to suggest that one purpose is the maintenance of homeostasis in the dreamer's relationship with the person or people to whom he tells the dream. We should also like to suggest that the dreamer's perception of his audience for the dream will help to determine what part of it is remembered, or if it is remembered at all. One member of the audience for the dream is the dreamer himself, and