Cultural Differences in Dream Content: Comparing Forager and Western Societies

Monday - January 29 2024, 23:43 UTC - 9 months ago

Do dreams vary across different cultures? A comparative study of forager and Western societies found that dreams from forager communities were more community-oriented and focused on social interactions, while Western dreams were more individualistic and centered on negative emotions.

Have you ever woken from a dream, emotionally laden with anxiety, fear, or a sense of unpreparedness? Typically, these kinds of dreams are associated with content like losing one’s voice, teeth falling out, or being chased by a threatening being.

But one question I’ve always been interested in is whether or not these kinds of dreams are experienced globally across many cultures. And if some features of dreaming are universal, could they have enhanced the likelihood of our ancestors surviving the evolutionary game of life? .

My research focuses on the distinctive characteristics that make humans the most successful species on Earth. I’ve explored the question of human uniqueness by comparing Homo sapiens with various animals, including chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, lemurs, wolves, and dogs. Recently, I’ve been part of a team of collaborators that has focused our energies on working with small-scale societies known as hunter-gatherers.

We wanted to explore how the content and emotional function of dreams might vary across different cultural contexts. By comparing dreams from forager communities in Africa to those from Western societies, we wanted to understand how cultural and environmental factors shape the way people dream.

Comparative Dream Research .

As part of this research, published in Nature Scientific Reports, my colleagues and I worked closely for several months with the BaYaka in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Hadza in Tanzania to record their dreams. For Western dreamers, we recorded dream journals and detailed dream accounts, collected between 2014 and 2022, from people living in Switzerland, Belgium, and Canada.

The Hadza of Tanzania and the BaYaka of Congo fill a crucial, underexplored gap for dream research due to their distinct lifestyle. Their egalitarian culture, emphasizing equality and cooperation, is vital for survival, social cohesion, and well-being. These forager communities rely heavily on supportive relationships and communal sharing of resources.

Higher mortality rates due to disease, intergroup conflict, and challenging physical environments in these communities (without the kind of social safety nets common to post-industrial societies in the West) means they rely on face-to-face relationships for survival in a way that is a distinct feature of forager life.

Dreaming Across Cultures .

While studying these dreams, we began to notice a common theme. We’ve discovered that dreams play out much differently across different socio-cultural environments. We used a new software tool to map dream content that connects important psychosocial constructs and theories with words, phrases, and other linguistic constructions. That gave us an understanding about the kinds of dreams people were having. And we could model these statistically to test scientific hypotheses as to the nature of dreams.

The dreams of the BaYaka and Hadza were rich in community-oriented content, reflecting the strong social bonds inherent in their societies. This was in stark contrast to the themes prevalent in dreams from Western societies, where negative emotions and anxiety were more common.

Interestingly, the more linear and stratified social structure of Western societies, with its focus on individualism and competition, appears to be mirrored in dreams. This could be one of several reasons why people from Western societies experience more individualistic dreams.

For example, some of the Western dreamers wrote about being lost or trapped in a maze, while in the dreams of the BaYaka and Hadza, animals and landscapes were often central rather than human figures. Social interactions and relationships were also more prominent in the dreams of foragers. These differences provide compelling evidence that dreams do vary in important ways depending on our social and cultural context.