Dreaming and personality: Wake-dream continuity, thought suppression, and the Big Five Inventory

•Relationships between dream content, personality traits, and trait thought suppression are investigated.•High levels of trait thought suppression are related to dreaming of waking-life emotions and waking-life relationships.•The results may support the compensation theory of dreaming.•The results m...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Consciousness and cognition 2015-12, Vol.38, p.9-15
Main Author: Malinowski, Josie E.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Big Five Inventory
Cognition & reasoning
Compensation
Dreaming
Dreams
Dreams - physiology
Female
Humans
Ironic process theory
Male
Middle Aged
Personality
Personality - physiology
Personality Inventory
Personality traits
Repression, Psychology
Thinking - physiology
Thought suppression
Wake-dream continuity
Wakefulness - physiology
Young Adult
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Summary:•Relationships between dream content, personality traits, and trait thought suppression are investigated.•High levels of trait thought suppression are related to dreaming of waking-life emotions and waking-life relationships.•The results may support the compensation theory of dreaming.•The results may support the ironic process theory of mental control is supported. Studies have found relationships between dream content and personality traits, but there are still many traits that have been underexplored or have had questionable conclusions drawn about them. Experimental work has found a ‘rebound’ effect in dreams when thoughts are suppressed prior to sleep, but the effect of trait thought suppression on dream content has not yet been researched. In the present study participants (N=106) reported their Most Recent Dream, answered questions about the content of the dream, and completed questionnaires measuring trait thought suppression and the ‘Big Five’ personality traits. Of these, 83 were suitably recent for analyses. A significant positive correlation was found between trait thought suppression and participants’ ratings of dreaming of waking-life emotions, and high suppressors reported dreaming more of their waking-life emotions than low suppressors did. The results may lend support to the compensation theory of dreams, and/or the ironic process theory of mental control.
ISSN:1053-8100
1090-2376
DOI:10.1016/j.concog.2015.10.004