'Hidden Truths' Are in Those Dreams

March 5, 2009 — -- Here's the scene: You wake up after dreaming about a horrible plane crash, and you're scheduled to board an aircraft later in the day for a long-awaited trip. Will that nightmare have any effect on whether you continue with your plans?

Possibly, according to a new multi-cultural study involving nearly 1,100 people around the world. You may not cancel your trip, but your dream will probably weigh as heavily on your thoughts as if there had been a real plane crash that day, not just a dream, according to the study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The study suggests that humans from a wide range of cultures believe their dreams are a window into the inner workings of the mind and that they may even influence our activities while we're awake. Dreams are serious stuff.

"Most people understand that dreams are unlikely to predict the future, but that doesn't prevent them from finding meaning in their dreams, whether their contents are mundane or bizarre," said psychologist Carey Morewedge of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, lead author of the study.

No doubt even the earliest humans were perplexed and fascinated by dreams that can sometimes seem as real as the world around us. Do they really mean anything? Scholars tended to dismiss them as little more than mental fireworks until the latter part of the 19th century. But when Sigmund Freud published "The Interpretation of Dreams" in 1899, he introduced science to the complex and bizarre world hidden in the human mind.

Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious," and for more than a century now, researchers have tried to travel down that road. We know now that dreams do mean something, and they are universal. The most common dream, according to some studies, occurs in all cultures, and it's virtually certain that anyone reading this article has experienced the same dream. Someone, or something, is in hot pursuit, and if the dreamer can't escape, the consequences will be deadly.

That universal dream usually means the person feels threatened, or under attack, or is recalling a time when an attack was real.