It has been suggested by many writers that the mental activity of dreaming and waking has lawful interactions. Most often it is proposed that the four or five dreams of the night represent a continuation of the cognitive processing of affective material made salient during the previous waking period (Freud, 1953; French and Fromm, 1964; Jones, 1970). This proposition has proved difficult to test in any formal way. Which of all the emotional stimuli of the day are likely to carryover into the dreams, and how is one to recognize them if they do? The problem of establishing the validity of the idea that a dream element is the equivalent of a waking experience has been troublesome. Dream images are so unique that unless some repetitive elements or themes can be established to exist and to have the same meaning whenever they occur, obtaining agreement on what a dream represents will be hard to establish. Most often this problem has been approached by manipulating the presleep situation to induce some known specific affect, such as sexual or aggressive feelings (Rechtschaffen and Foulkes, 1965; Witkin and Lewis, 1967; Cartwright, Bernick, Borowitz, and Kling, 1969), or by studying the dreams following some naturally occurring, highly arousing situation (Breger, Hunter, and Lane, 1971). Although these methods have produced examples of dreams in which the influence of the prior waking situation is undeniably clear, the data have either not been analyzed according to the usual statistical tests or the tests have not established the lawfulness of this relation. © 1979 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
