I’m reading a rather interesting book at the moment; The creative Dreamer by Veronica Tonay PhD. The subtitle is ‘using your dreams to unlock your creativity’, which sounds a bit cheesy – more cheesy than the book actually is. So far anyway. The first two thirds of the book are all about the psychology of dreaming, creative personality types and how the two fit together. There are some interesting statistics about the likelihood of creatives experiencing certain events and situations as a child and of the personality traits they may have as an adult. What I wanted to mention here though are the differences researchers have found between how men and women dream. Mostly, both genders dream in a similar way (as do people across cultures), but there a number of differences. Apparently, women dream equally of men and women whereas men dream more often of men. Women dream more often of people familiar to them whereas men dream of strangers more often. Research has shown than aggression is very common in dreams; women dream of themselves as the victims of another’s aggression more often; men have more aggression in their dreams and are more often the initiators than women. Women have roughly the same number of friendly and aggressive dream encounters, whereas mean have aggressive ones more often than friendly ones.
These are the findings having analysed the ‘average’ person’s dreams. Creative people however, seem to be more androgynous in their dreaming; the gender boundaries are blurred and there is more of a mix of the elements mentioned above. This is apparently because creative people tend to be more psychologically androgynous in that they display both feminine and masculine personality traits. Interesting stuff, although not sure where this is all leading. Better read on to find out…
