Typical Dream of Chinese College Students
(Final Draft)
Pan Ruoting (Lareina) Feng Tianrong (Terri) Zou Hui (Jayce)
Wenzhou Kean University
Submitted to Professor Mohammad
Research & Technology GE 2021 W2
Date May 15, 15
1
Abstract
Typical dreams refer to dreams with similar content that was occurred repeatedly
by most of dreamer. The present research investigated the frequency of typical dream
experienced by Chinese college students and did contrastive study of differences
between Western and Chinese college students. 216 Chinese college students in 20
colleges participated in the online research. Dreams about “being chased and pursed”,
“taking examination”, and “sexual experience” is the three most commonly picked
answer. The results corroborates that the frequency of typical dream for Chinese
college students is similar with the frequency of typical dream reported by western
college students. The result also demonstrates that typical dream are distinguished by
both the age and gender.
2
Introduction
Since antiquity, dream and dream interpretation is an indispensable part of
human life. In ancient China, the Duke of Zhou’s Dream Dictionary listed large
quantities of records of dreams and the corresponding implied meaning. In the West,
according to the book “The Interpretation of Dreams”, Sigmund Freud indicated that
the dream is the fulfillment of a wish (Freud 1913). Many scholars devoted to seek
out the relationship between dreams and reality. Dreams are not only the images in
our mind, but also contain our experiences, emotion and future. Dreams will also
affect people’s memories, learning ability, and mental health. The importance of
interpretation of dreams has long been recognized by western psychologists.
In terms of the contents of dreams, there exists significant difference among
individuals, whereas majorities of people have similar theme dreams. Some writers
(Garfield, 2001) proposed that a lot of dream themes are universal. In scientific and
clinical fields, taxonomies of dream themes have been proposed that they have a basic
repetition dimension, which reflects inter-individual consistencies in people’s
emotional concerns (Domhoff, 1996). In contrast with the unique dream, typical
dreams could be characterized by dreams with analogous contents experienced by the
majority of people (Schredl et al., 2004).
Overseas, there already have many studies which seek the themes of typical
dreams. And there are many reliable data and results about typical dreams of western
countries. However, different cultural background and lifestyle will have an impact on
the themes of typical dreams. Firstly, compared with college students, Chinese college
students are accepted by traditional Chinese education which is significantly different
from western education. Secondly, different lifestyle distinguishes Chinese college
students’ mental state from western college students’. Therefore, there is a big need
for a better understanding of Chinese college students’ dreams to significant
improvements in their waking life. So, this research will investigate Chinese college
students’ typical dreams. The research will sum up the typical dreams themes of
Chinese college students, find out the most frequent dream themes differing from
gender and grade, and analyze them. Additionally, the study will compare the results
with the students’ typical dreams of other countries.
Literature Review
A preliminary literature review shows that past studies are primarily focused on
the prevalence profile and frequencies of typical dreams themes experienced by a
certain group of people. Griffith, Miyagi, and Tago (1958) administered a list of 34
typical dream themes to American and Japanese college students, and asked them to
3
choose which dream themes they had experienced frequently. The studies indicated
that 34 dream topics were reported by a large quantity of college students.
Hence, Griffith puted forward Typical Dreams Questionnaire (TDQ), which was
composed of 34 typical dreams. In the meanwhile, he found many culture differences.
Such as in American college students’ dream, fire appeared more frequently, while in
Japanese college students’ dream, nude appeared more frequently. Griffith considered
that the different culture background lead to the difference of typical dream.
These earlier studies provide the original evidence for the existence of typical
dream. But these studies can neither explain the type and frequency of the typical
dream nor explain the relationship between personality characteristics and socio-
cultural factors. What’s more it also can’t explain the significance of these typical
dreams to individual or society. Therefore, some new researches emerge just as the
times require. Psychologist Hall proposed a coding system for the contents of dream
in the 1950s, based on his dream theme analysis of university students. Then
psychologist Robert Van DE Castle perfected the system in the 1960s. Although the
system was able to provide an objective and effective method for the quantitative
research of dream, it can’t solve some questions such as the theme of the dream,
dimensions, or the characteristics of the typical dream. And other coding system is
very limited (Winget&Kramer.1979); it can only handle some dimensions of the
dream, which associated with the specific psychological theory. Home journals are a
very practical method in getting the typical dream, but when need a lot of subjects; it
is hard to work by using this way. It’s also very difficult to collect a lot of useful
information about the dream through laboratory. Zadra and Nielsen (1997, 1999)
revised and expanded the typical dream questionnaire on the basis of questionnaire of
Griffith R.M. (1958). They extend the number of typical dreams of the questionnaire
to 55. TDQ compared with these methods has more advantages in a wide range of
research topics of typical dream. Through the questionnaire for measuring you can
soon realize the most important theme of dream in a group of people.
At present, domestic research mainly focuses on the use of Hall /Van DE Castle
dream content encoding system, study of college students’ dream content
characteristics. They don’t have the investigation of the topic about dreams yet.
Therefore, this research adopts the revised questionnaire about typical dreams from
Zadra and Nielsen and measures college students all over China.
On the one hand, we want to collect the dream theme from the college students
in China, and do a comparison with foreign related research. Because Chinese and
western culture have very big difference, culture will react in the dream
unconsciously, Hoping that after comparing we can discover how cultural differences
reflect in the dreamer’s dream; On the other hand, we hope that through the study we
can find that the three most frequent dream theme of contemporary Chinese college
students, then we will use the psychological analysis method to analysis these three
typical dream based on Chinese culture. We try to find out the meaning hidden behind
these typical dreams, and further points out the profound significance for
contemporary college students and the contemporary Chinese society.
4
Methodology
Participants
Overall, the sample included 216 college students from 20 colleges in China, 104
men (48.15%) and 112 women (51.85%). 18.98% of students are freshmen, 45.37%
of students are sophomore, 21.76% of students are junior, and 13.89% are senior.
The Typical Dreams Questionnaire
The research used the typical dreams questionnaire (Nielson et al., 2003 Zadra &
Nielsen, 1997, 1999). The TDQ listed 55 dream themes. In the present research, it is
translated into Chinese. The TDQ requires students to check which themes they have
ever dreamed. (Yes or No for counting prevalently rates). And one question was added
to find out the 3 most frequent typical dream appeared in students’ dream. The
original Typical Dreams Questionnaire required participants to give response on a 5-
point scale for each typical dream. Considering that people did not record their dream
in a written document ，they can not make a clear distinction between “very
frequently” and “frequently” of a typical dream occurred. Therefore, the present
research was still designed to elicit dichotomous answer.
5
