Are Negative Attitudes Toward Dreams Just the Inverse of Positive Attitudes Toward Dreams? An Empirical Investigation

Abstract

As dreaming is a universal phenomenon, it seems natural that everyone has a more or less explicitly defined attitude toward dreams. Recent studies indicate that positive and negative attitude toward dream scales—even given there is considerable overlap—might not be related to the same variables. The findings of the present online survey (N = 2,056) using 22 attitude items indicated that positive and negative attitudes can be differentiated through confirmatory factor analysis and that variables like age, education, and frequent dream recall are differentially associated with positive and negative attitudes toward dreams. It would be very interesting to expand this study to investigate whether other variables, personality dimensions, general skepticism and so on, are associated with positive and negative attitudes toward dreams in different ways.