An Exploration On Dreams Of Undergraduate Students

In the long history of mankind, dreams always have been an intriguing subject. Although many generations have made various guesses and assumptions about the phenomenon of dreaming, up till today a definite consensus around the meaning of dreams is still lacking. Freud's (1900) theory gives us a threshold on the scientific study of dreams. After Freud, several psychologists also putted forward their theories on dreams (Jung, 1976; Hobson.J.A&McCarley.R.W, 1977; Hall, C.S., 1953) Developed as the theories, there are several study methods of dreams adopted, such as free association, metaphoric analysis, thematic analysis and content analysis. However, in these methods only the content analysis has a unique advantage in dream research. Hall/Van de Castle coding system provides us with an objective and quantitative tool to do dream content research. This system has been extensively applied abroad and has gained meaningful conclusions.The researcher took Chinese undergraduate students as study object, and collected 198 dream reports of students from three different universities. She analyzed these dream reports by the Hall/ Van de Castle coding system, and contrasted the dream contents of Chinese students with the existing American findings. She discovered that Chinese students report more familiar characters, yet less aggressive and sexual contents in their dreams. The author also compared the influence of sex, grade, major and educational degree on dream content. She found that dreams of male Chinese students show less familiar characters; family characters, Dead & Imaginary characters and friendly behavior, but a higher percentage of Dreamer-Involved Success than female Chinese students .Grade, major and educational degree seem to make no significant difference.The study of the relation between dreams, mental health and personality is the second focus of this paper. We found that misfortune in dreams can explain students' mental health state. A/C, F/C, self-negativity, negative emotion and the misfortune index of dream contents show significant correlations with personality characteristics.The third part of this study is a case study, in which the author analyzed the cognitive state of a particular dreamer. From this case study, the author will argue that dreams constitute a valid tool in understanding personality related aspects in an individual.This research integrated the investigation method and case study method, analyzed the undergraduate students' dreams contents more thoroughly and deeply and can provide good data for future research of dreams.