Abstract:
The content of dreams appears to influence the creation of both internally and externally generated false memories. Two studies were employed to examine the extent to which dreams are confused with memories of real events. The first study examined the extent to which external suggestion influenced participants’ (N=33) likelihood to misremember dream content in a laboratory context. On the first day, participants were asked to study a list of words and pictures. The following day they were exposed to a false suggestion that words and people from their dream were on the list of words and pictures viewed on the previous day. On the third day, they were asked to recall what had been presented on the original list. Findings suggested that externally generated false memories using dream content did not occur as frequently as prior research indicated. Furthermore, on the last day there was no bias for a misinformation effect using dream content except for novel words provided in the final test. This last finding may suggest that one’s own dream words are inherently more familiar and thus more likely to be falsely remembered. The second study asked participants (N=161) to complete an online questionnaire that examined the prevalence and corresponding factors of internally generated false origins of dreams. The results demonstrated that a sizable proportion of participants reported having memories of which the origin could not be established. Overall, the results indicate that dream content can sometimes be confused for memories of real events. These confusions could have significant implications for forensic contexts and processes, such as false memories of crimes being brought to police or dream content being included through accidental suggestion of false information.