Dreaming and waking consciousness: a character recognition study

The formal features of dream characters were studied in a sample of 320 dre am reports submitted by 33 adult subjects (13 male, 20 female) of varying a ges in a university extension course. Subjects were queried by questionnair e about dream characters immediately after recording their dreams upon awak ening in their normal home setting. It was found that 48% of characters rep resented a named personage known to the dreamer, 35% were generically ident ified by their social role (e.g., policeman) or abstract relation to the dr eamer (e.g., a friend) while only 16% were wholly novel. Seventy-seven perc ent of characters were pseudosensorily present in the dream whereas 23% wer e present only by mention or thought. Subjects were allowed to endorse one or more of four bases of recognition and, among named characters, 32% were identified by 'appearance', 21% by 'behavior', 45% by 'face', and 44% by 'j ust knowing' (with the respective percentages for generic characters being 39%, 38%, 9% and 40%). Fourteen percent of named and generic characters had associated some element of bizarreness most frequently consisting of an in congruous feature. Comparing the 25 longest and 25 shortest reports, named subjects were significantly more common in the shortest reports whereas gen eric and unknown characters were more common in the longest reports. Result s are interpreted in neurocognitive terms as possibly reflecting a decrease during dreaming relative to waking in the exchange of information between inferotemporal face identification areas and prefrontal areas subserving lo gic and working memory.