35% Experimental Design - Description of a study to test your

hypothesis - Method (including whether it is realistic and

ethical). - Explanation of which factors are manipulated and
how.
25% Interestingness - Your argument as to why your study is
Interesting

The Effect of Health-Media Prevalence on Dream Topics in Developed

Countries

Assignment One PSYC426

Most people dream when they sleep, and many remember their dream when they wake, at least some of the time.
The data of Mornings.co.uk (2022) show that the most common dreams remembered (or at least Googled) by
people living in the majority of first world, developed countries (including North America, Western Europe, Australia
and New Zealand) is about teeth falling out. People living in these countries tend to have high average incomes
relative to other nations. In concert with this higher income, they have higher rates of ‘man-made’ diseases in their
populations as a consequence of diet and lifestyle factors. Examples of this include obesity (Blüher, 2019), heart
disease (Barquera et al., 2015), hypertension (Zhou et al., 2021) and diabetes (Cho et al., 2018). In response, people
from these countries are more likely to have higher health-improvement related media production and consumption
rates in order to educate people on these health risks and potential solutions. So, I suggest that the rate of
occurrence of these stressful dreams focused on improper body function is related to the amount of health-
improvement media a population is exposed to.

In previous studies, dreams have been seen to focus on both unsolved problems (Barrett, 2017) and emotional
dilemmas (Bulkeley, 2017) from the dreamers waking life. Health risks and solutions are advertised
within developed countries at a high rate – healthier diets, gym memberships, miracle supplements, as well as
constant reminders of how our current lifestyle will likely lead to the diseases discussed above. This high rate of
exposure and the high-risk consequences of getting our health wrong, means that health is likely a
high-priority and high-stress concern for many people exposed to this media, and has the potential
to be reflected in dreams at a societal level. This may explain why a large proportion of people who live
in developed countries report this teeth-falling-out dream – a dream focused on stress, related
to improper body functions, and one that is a symptom of many man-made diseases. Notably,
the developed countries of Asia (Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea) do not report a high
prevalence of teeth-falling-out dreams in Mornings.co.uk’s data (2022). In concert, the articles cited above
relating to rates of the various man-made diseases, also demonstrate that these countries do not experience
the high levels of man-made diseases that the rest of the developed countries do, and hence developed Asian
countries are less likely to have extensive health-related media. This supports my hypothesis that health-related
media may be linked to dreams focused on body function.

Hence, this experiment will aim to determine whether exposure to health-related media influences the content of
dreams towards or away from stressful/unpleasant dreams related to incorrect body function. Ninety thousand
participants will be recruited from developed countries which reported the teeth-falling-out dream (Canada, United
States of America, England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, France, Italy, [list a couple of other European countries
coloured pink….] Australia and New Zealand). [the countries each have a different population size. Would it be better
to do eg 1% of the population….if so, I suggest putting the number of participants in brackets after the country]
Ninety thousand participants (or 1%?) will also be recruited from the developed countries of Asia that did not report
a frequent occurrence of the teeth-falling-out dreams (Japan……….). These groups are large to reflect the high inter-
and intra-personal variation of dreams and are likely to be too large for a realistic study by one research group but
could form the basis for a meta-analysis of data collected by many groups.
Explanation of which factors are manipulated and
how.

The participant pool from each country will be split into three equal groups. The first will be a control
group, with no interventions. The second will have the media they are exposed to curated
(unknowingly to them) to increase their consumption of health- related media (adverts relating to
unhealthy lifestyles, diet suggestions, supplements etc). The third group will have the media they are
exposed to unknowingly curated again, but this time health-related media would be removed and replaced with
non-health related adverts.
What about all the usual media in their country that caused them to have the dreams in the first place? How will you
block that out in the third group? Maybe just do the expt with Asian countries that don’t have that media in the first
place? But then group 1 and 3 would be the same….. Maybe just acknowledge this?

This experiment will run for twelve months, and all participants will be asked to record their dreams each morning
for this duration. These dream logs will be collected from participants at the end of twelve months and coded for
themes relating to dream content and associated emotions. My hypothesis is that relative to the control group, the
participants who were exposed to more health-related content (Group 2) would experience more stressful dreams
related to their body and how it functions. Conversely, participants in the group exposed to less health-related
media (Group 3) would experience a decrease in such dreams. Participants from developed Asia may only experience
an increase in these types of dreams in the group with increase health-media exposure (Group 2), without the
decrease in the group with decreased health-media exposure, due to the already low levels of man-made health
issues, and hence health- media, in these countries. An important note is that all participants in this study will need
to pass a medical examination from a general practitioner prior to being accepted into the study and six months into
the study. They will also receive a full medical examination at the end of the study to uphold the ethical nature of
the research and ensure that no significant health repercussions result from their consumption of health-related
media.

This experiment provides the opportunity to build on current dream-research which, to date, has only studied
dreams in relation to uniquely personal problems. However, the current study could have significant implications on
past and future research if societal-level concerns or stressors are seen to influence dreams at a societal level. If the
findings support the hypothesis that….. , it could also suggest dreams are a useful method of analysing and
understanding society’s consumption and interpretations of certain media themes. These ideas could then be
extended to findings from the remaining countries (Mornings.co.uk., 2022) and similar coding be used to analyse the
dreams from developing countries to identify potential stressors and perceptions of these. All of these factors
prove it to be an interesting area of research with the potential to fill an existing gap in the
literature.

Interesting? Previously dreams have only been studied in relation to uniquely personal problems
rather than societal ones. Hence this could have further implications and applications if dreams
provide a way to understand society’s consumption and interpretations of certain themes.
Could analyse the other dream themes to guess what troubles each country.