Dreams in cross-cultural research

The neglect of dreams, so argued G. Murphy,⁸ is one of the greatest instances of myopia in modern psychology. The situation was not better in anthropology. Only 20 years ago one could read such statements as this "...it is frequently an investigator's first task to convince his colleagues that dreams are admissible as scientific data." (Eggan, 1952). Today we have no reason for such complaints. Dream research has become a fashionable topic of psychological laboratories, and although concentrating at this moment mainly around the physiological aspects, nevertheless it "discovered" the phenomenon of dreaming. We tried to show that dreams are a valuable tool in cross-cultural research, too. Using a dream questionnaire we compared the recalled dreams of the ethnic groups: Israeli and Arab high-school students. The main result was a difference between the two groups regarding the internalization of social values. We would like also to emphasize the method used in this research: a factorial analysis of the recalled dreams in defining the dominant personality themes, whereas the various dreams belonging to one factor depict the psychodynamics of this theme.