156 CHAPTER 4
In this theory, called the activation-synthesis hypothesis, a dream is merely another
kind of thinking that occurs when people sleep. It is less realistic because it comes not
from the outside world of reality but from within people’s memories and experiences of
the past. The frontal lobes, which people normally use in daytime thinking, are more or
less shut down during dreaming, which may also account for the unrealistic and often
bizarre nature of dreams (Macquet & Franck, 1996).My dreams can be really weird, but sometimes they seem pretty
ordinary or even seem to mean something. Can dreams be more
meaningful?THE ACTIVATION-INFORMATION-MODE (AIM) MODEL There are dream experts who
suggest that dreams may have more meaning than Hobson and McCarley originally
theorized. A survey questioning subjects about their dream content, for example, con-
cluded that much of the content of dreams is meaningful, consistent over time, and fits
in with past or present emotional concerns rather than being bizarre, meaningless, and
random (Domhoff, 1996, 2005).
Hobson and colleagues have reworked the activation-synthesis hypothesis to reflect
concerns about dream meaning, calling it the activation-information-mode model, or
AIM (Hobson et al., 2000). In this newer version, information that is accessed during
waking hours can have an influence on the synthesis of dreams. In other words, when
the brain is “making up” a dream to explain its own activation, it uses meaningful bits
and pieces of the person’s experiences from the previous day or the last few days rather
than just random items from memory.What Do People Dream About?
- 8 Identify commonalities and differences in the content of people’s dreams.
Calvin Hall believed that dreams are just another type of cognitive process, or thinking,
that occurred during sleep in his cognitive theory of dreaming (Hall, 1953). He collected more
than 10,000 dreams and concluded that most dreams reflect the events that occur in every-
day life (Hall, 1966). Although most people dream in color, people who grew up in the era
of black-and-white television sometimes have dreams in black and white. There are gen-
der differences, although whether those differences are caused by hormonal/genetic influ-
ences, sociocultural influences, or a combination of influences remains to be seen. In his
book Finding Meaning in Dreams, Dr. William Domhoff (1996) concluded that across many
cultures, men more often dream of other males whereas women tend to dream about
males and females equally. Men across various cultures also tend to have more physical
aggression in their dreams than do women, and women are more often the victims of such
aggression in their own dreams. Domhoff also concluded that where there are differences
in the content of dreams across cultures, the differences make sense in light of the culture’s
“personality.” For example, American culture is considered fairly aggressive when com-
pared to the culture of the Netherlands, and the aggressive content of the dreams in both
cultures reflects this difference: There were lower levels of aggression in the dreams of
those from the Netherlands when compared to the Americans’ dream content.
Girls and women tend to dream about people they know, personal appearance con-
cerns, and issues related to family and home. Boys and men tend to have more male
characters in their dreams, which are also typically in outdoor or unfamiliar settings and
may involve weapons, tools, cars, and roads. Men also report more sexual dreams, usu-
ally with unknown and attractive partners (Domhoff, 1996; Domhoff & Schneider, 2008;
Foulkes, 1982; Horikawa et al., 2013; Van de Castle, 1994).
In dreams people run, jump, talk, and do all of the actions that they do in normal
daily life. Nearly 50 percent of the dreams recorded by Hall (1966) had sexual content,
although later research has found lower percentages (Van de Castle, 1994). Then there
activation-synthesis hypothesis
premise that states that dreams are
created by the higher centers of the
cortex to explain the activation by the
brain stem of cortical cells during REM
sleep periods.
activation-information-mode
model, or AIM
revised version of the activation syn-
thesis explanation of dreams in which
information that is accessed during
waking hours can have an influence
on the synthesis of dreams.