MEASURING DREAM SELF-REFLECTIVENESS - A COMPARISON OF 2 APPROACHES

Reflective awareness is the awareness of one's thoughts and actions an d the deliberate direction of them. This type of ''metacognitive monit oring'' is assumed to occur infrequently during dreaming. However, dre am researchers have tended to rely on the narrative report as an index of process features of dreaming such as reflective awareness which ma y, in fact, be under-reported in the dream narrative. The present stud y compared the evidence of dream reflective awareness obtained via two different measures; one based on the objective scoring of the narrati ve dream report and the other based on subjects' ratings of the phenom enal qualities of their dreams. The distribution of dream self-reflect iveness (SR) scores obtained via third person ratings was consistent w ith previous research. However, subjects' self-ratings indicated a hig her incidence of metacognitive activities during dreaming than was sug gested by SR scores. These findings underscore the value of asking sub jects specific questions regarding aspects of dream experience that ma y not be spontaneously included in the dream report and highlight the value of utilizing alternative approaches to measuring dream