Dreaming About Favorite Celebrities in Two Different Cultures

Abstract

We administered a Celebrity Dream Scale, selected items adapted from Schredl’s Dream Questionnaire (MADRE), and the Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS) to university students from the United States and Iran in order to determine similarities and differences. We predicted and found a gender difference in the reporting of dreams in the U.S. sample, but not in Iran. We obtained additional evidence for the well-documented continuity hypothesis for dreams, but not for nightmares. We predicted and found that persons who were strongly attracted to their favorite celebrity would report dreaming about that celebrity more often than those who were not strongly attracted to their favorite celebrity. We did not find support for the negativity bias, either in dreams in general, or dreams involving one’s favorite celebrity, romantic or otherwise. Consistent with the results of previous research, we found a few differences in dreaming between the two different cultures.