Do men and women dream differently?

The results are in: It appears that men and women tend to report different types of dreams more frequently than others. But what do these results mean -- and what exactly do dreams do, anyway? Tune in to find out.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom Never told you?
From house Stop works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Molly. Since we're talking

(00:21):
about dreams today, and by dreams, I do mean the
things that you think about in uh fantasy land when
you sleep, sleepytime, sleep time, sleepytime, movies as opposed to dreams,
hopes and goals, hopes, goals, aspirations, fulfilled and unfulfilled. Yeah,

(00:41):
we're talking about dreams, the night, the stuff going on
at night, the things Mr sand mem brings you. Yes,
and so mine. I were figuring out how we wanted
to start this off, and we we're gonna talk about
some recent dreams we had had, but then quickly remembered
that talking about your dreams is perhaps one of the

(01:03):
worst conversation topics you can choose, wouldn't you agree, Molly?
I do think that it's very hard to listen to
another person's dreams. I mean, our own dreams are endlessly
fascinating to us. Um And you know, I do feel
kind of bad because Kristin did ask me earlier today
what I dreamt about last night and getting ready for
this podcast, and I went off on a little tangentle

(01:23):
I was genuinely curious. But now note, remembering that people
just don't like hearing dream talk, I feel feel a
little ashamed. Yeah, maybe you could write about it on
on Facebook, share it there. That'll be the quickest way
to get you too, to unfriend me. I bet, yeah,
that's true. So instead of talking about our own dreams,

(01:44):
why don't we talk about other people's dreams, Because the
question of whether men and women dream differently in a nutshell,
we can say yes, yes, and it's it's pretty interesting.
There have been a lot of surveys and studies in
which researchers hand out dream journals and tell the men
and women to go out into the world and dream

(02:06):
and bring back what they dream about. And based on
all these studies, you can draw very clear lines between
stereotypically male dreams and female dreams. Three main dream themes
that come up a lot more often for men than
women are things like finding money, killing someone, and having sex. Yes.

(02:27):
I think if you can um put male dreams into
a nutshell at sex and violence, yeah, then yeah, I
want to kill kill someone and then go have sex
someone but they don't know and uh, and be wildly
rich while doing all of this, whereas women have a
lot more stressful dreams. We dream about things like losing

(02:48):
our teeth, going to school and having to take a test,
and also wardrobe malfunctions and our loved ones and you know, aggression.
We just talked about how men's dreams are so violent
and there's usually you know, a physical punch, and if
women dream about aggression, it's more like a bully and
someone saying something to them. It's all verbal aggression and

(03:11):
uh and words that hurt. Yeah. So of course that
sounds like a giant gender stereotype taking place in our
nocturnal psyches, where women are emotional and and stressing over
human relationships and how they're presented to the world and
what they're wearing. Whereas men are just driven to kill
and have sex. Well, that's what we've got to get into, Christen,

(03:35):
the question of why do we dream? And there are
a few theories we can throw out. Some people think
that we solve problems in our dreams. So if if
men and women are in front on a daily basis
with these types of problems, then that would make sense
that that's what we go home and dream about. And
another theory is that we practice for life in our dreams. Um,
so you know, maybe we work out these problems in

(03:56):
our dreams so the next day when we're confronted with them,
we know how to deal. For example, you always have
that dream where you're studying for a test. Maybe you
do have something coming up in the workplace, for example
that's equivalent to that, and you work out the stress
in your dream and you're ready for it in real life. Well,
speaking of the workplace, that's one dream theme that might

(04:17):
lend some credence to the the idea that dreams reflect
issues that are going on in your personal life. For instance,
there was a study from the University of Ottawa that
analyzed the dreams of nine adults, so that's a pretty
small study sample, but women showed a huge increase in

(04:40):
dreaming about the workplace and issues related to the workplace
and finances and things like that. And their idea was
that since women are have over the past fifty years
really gotten out of the home and gotten more on
par with men in terms of the working world and
all that, that they are naturally dreaming about those kind

(05:02):
of issues even more. And there's also been a closing
of the gender gap in terms of our sexy dreams,
because there was a study on typical dreams in terms
of those themes that pop up a lot across cultures
and that are shared across genders, such as dreams about falling,
or going to school, or being chased, and six comes

(05:25):
up a lot, because both men and women do have
sex dreams at some point. But back in the day
when they first started looking at this, in uh the
nineteen fifties and sixties, men reported sex streams far more
often than women did. For instance, in nineteen fifty eight,
that gap was ninety two point five percent for men

(05:49):
and only thirty six point two percent for women. But
then when they went back in two thousand three and
looked at the frequency of in versus women reporting sex streams,
it closed to of men and of women. But that
might not necessarily mean that women are dreaming about sex more.

(06:12):
But we might just be more comfortable saying to some researcher,
we don't know, yeah, I dreamed about having an intimate
moment with a certain person. Or conversely, the men may
feel less comfortable saying I had all this anonymous sex
in my dreams, um, and maybe they're reporting it less now.
The sex dreams still do have a divide in that

(06:34):
men are more likely to dream about women they don't know,
men or women that they don't know. They're multiple and
multiple partners at the same time. In their sex dreams.
The men rarely have to make the first move. The
women just sort of drape themselves on on the on them.
But women are more likely to see a current or
former partner in their sex stream about their sex dreams,

(06:55):
and they're more likely to be romantic. In fact, some
of the sex dreams that they have each start with
a really long walk where you hold hands, you make out.
Women only get to like first or second base in
their sex dreams, whereas men are just going all the
way around the basis multiple times. So there are more
patterns of seduction and for play in women's dreams compared

(07:17):
to men who just have anonymous women approached them and
they just get right down to business they do. That's
another gender divide, But I do think it's interesting to
see that that gender gap clothes in terms of reporting
of sex dreams. Now, one other thing I found really
interesting about dream breakdowns is that women have more nightmares
than men. You know, we were talking about how men's

(07:40):
dreams are sex and violence, and personally, if I had
really violent dreams all the time, I would consider that
a nightmare. But the men wake up very much unaffected
by chasing people and killing them. But women, when they
have these dreams um not necessarily violent dreams, but any
dreams with negative emotion, it affects them far more often.
In one study where they ask the women what they're
most memorable dream was, it was it tended to be

(08:02):
a nightmare. It tended to be something awful. So women
are having more nightmares, and the nightmares are more significant
to them than men. And it might be because some
studies indicate that women are slightly better than men at
remembering their dreams, so maybe it's just a little more
those those nightmares become a little more ingrained in our brain,

(08:23):
so in the morning we're we're actually thinking about it.
It's a little bit more potent. And there were three
major categories of nightmares that women have, which would be
fearful dreams, confused dreams, and dreams of losing a loved one,
and a lot of times it seemed like when women
would talk about these dreams there would be more negative

(08:46):
emotion than when men might talk about murdering somebody. Yeah,
and you know something I did not reading all of
these articles, Christen, is that you know, it does sort
of tend to fall down into these gender stereotypes of
women are more emotional, men are more violent, um and
and whenever the researchers would present these conclusions, there was

(09:07):
always an opposing researcher ready to pipe up and say,
this is interesting, but let's not take it too seriously,
because we don't want sleep to become this really gender topic.
We don't know yet if this has any implications for
treating dream patterns or changing dream patterns, And so it
was really interesting that despite the fact that sometimes these
survey samples are really small, they're kind of scattered, but

(09:30):
they do have really consistent conclusions that people are still like,
let's wait, but I do think we have to take
these differences, these gender differences and dreaming with a grain
of salt, because when you consider the entire dreamscape, men
and women do cross a lot of the same territory.

(09:51):
We tend to have the same numbers of dreams and
a lot of overlapping themes. Like I mentioned earlier, and
there was a study in the Journal of Psychology G
that came out of Germany that looked at fifty five
different dream themes such as oh here a few, being
unable to find or embarrass about using a toilet, uh,
your teeth, falling out insects or spiders being physically attacked.

(10:14):
And with all of these themes both men and women,
it had popped up in both men and women's dreams.
And there were many, many, many of the of the
fifty five such as falling, arriving too late, um, flying
in the air, where men and women dreamed about these
types of things roughly the same amount, but some notable

(10:38):
differences would be like the finding money or killing someone.
And this, Molly, what I thought was the most interesting
difference that stood out to me. Women tended to dream
far more than men about being a member of the
opposite sex. That is interesting. It was a pretty big,
pretty big gap. But like I said, overall, when you

(10:58):
look at this chart of fifty five the memes, they're
popping up in both of our brains, but um, you know,
maybe just not with the same frequency. Besides, who even
knows that our dreams I really our own? Are we dreaming? Now?
Is this a dream dream? So? Uh? You know, like
like she said, you gotta take it with a grain

(11:18):
of salt. It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out,
um in terms of fifty years, just thinking about how
women are dreaming more about the workplace and more about sex.
Maybe in twenty years will be having the violent killing
people dreams. Well, if you have noticed any market differences
between what you dream about and what someone from the
opposite sex dreams about, let us know if you are

(11:40):
a guy who constantly dreams about losing his teeth or
having wardrobe malfunctions, really want to hear from you or
women who are constantly finding piles and piles of money.
That would be fascinating because you, my friends are breaking
gender norms in the dream world, which if there is
any real world significance to that, I have no idea,
but it'd be nice to hear about. So email us
at Mom's stuff at how stuff works dot com. And

(12:07):
I have an email here if it's from Jennifer, and
it's about the child Free podcast. She writes, I'm a
thirty two year old teacher and have been married for
eight years. Neither of us ever wanted to become parents,
an issue we discussed before getting married. The only sticking
point for me from the podcast and subsequent listener mail
has been the assumption that child free couples decide not
to have children because they would not be good parents.

(12:27):
The fact is that my husband I would be excellent parents.
I care for my friend's children, and I enjoy doing it.
I even was one of the few people who would
agree to care for my friend's triplets, now five years old,
when they were infants. My husband and I are loving,
nurturing people and would provide a stable and fulfilling home
for any child. I can't speak for others, but I
know that me being child free wasn't a decision at all.
I never wanted children, so I just never made the

(12:48):
decision to become a parent. I think my lucky stars
every day through that through birth control, I am able
to be married and still prevent pregnancy. I know this
is a difficult issue issue to understand for people who
are parents. I just don't want anyone thinking that child
free couples are child free because they're mean, lazy, selfish,
or in any other way ill equipped to meet parents. Well.
I have an email here from Haley in response to

(13:09):
our recent podcast on librarians and Haley writes, when I
was in high school, I worked at my local library
as a page, and it was, without a doubt, the
best job I ever had. All the librarians I worked
with were inclined to our holiday themed vest and coordinating
ear rings. They were a super cool and subversive group

(13:29):
of ladies. Guess you can't judge a book by its cover.
They were, of course, incredibly well read and introduced me
to some pretty radical literature and ideas. Also, in reference
to the sexual harassment in libraries, I believe it. The
public library is a great open space for the community,
but it's warmth and amenities also attract a bit of
a seedier element. I was never harassed myself, but saw

(13:51):
my share of strange behavior and the leftovers of strange behavior.
Let's just say, some weird stuff goes on in library bathrooms.
Oh god, that's well again. If you want to send
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works dot com. You can also hit us up on
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(14:12):
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(14:34):
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