Who are the people in my dreams? Self-awareness and character identification in dreaming

Abstract

Dreaming is an important state of consciousness that complements the awake state. Self-awareness, as well as the ability to recognize other people, are essential characteristics of everyday life. The recognition of Self and others is based on, among others, autobiographical and episodic memory, and emotional, and evaluative systems, or perceptual cues. The goal of the paper is to answer a question of how characters (the dreamer and others) that appear in dreams are recognized. The research was conducted to determine the main features connected with dream character identification, as well as the main modalities that could be helpful in this process. 153 subjects were asked to write down the last dream they remember and to fill out the questionnaire about the dream character recognition. The Hall/Van de Castle Coding System was used to examine the dream content. Results concerning self-awareness and dream character identification are presented. Moreover, future research directions, and limitations of the study are discussed.