The Stability and Variability of Dreaming

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Abstract
To examine the stability and variability of psychological dreaming, we collected dream content from the end of the first four REM periods of the night for 20 consecutive nights from 14 volunteers, The dreams were scored for characters, activities, and descriptive elements utilizing the Hall- Van de Castle dream content scoring system, We were able to recover an adequate amount of dreaming (76% recall) from our awakenings and to achieve an adequate level of scoring reliability (91% agreement). Mean content was stable, as the mean overall night to night significant correlation of 0.46 reflects, yet variable enough (79% of the variance is unexplained) to be reasonable and manageable (3 to 15 items per night). Adaptation in dream content did occur as reflected (I) in all four second week content correlations being significant and larger than the nonsignificant first week correlations, and (2) in nights 19 and 20 being highly correlated and significant, whereas nights I and 2 were not; nights 10 and II, while nonsignificant, were at an intermediate level. We conclude that dreaming is both a stable and variable phenomenon that shows clear evidence of adaptation across nights.

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