You may have seen the headline a few years ago - "Republicans have more Nightmares than Democrats." The study by Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D. was presented at the conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams, held at the University of California, Santa Cruz in July of 2001. He didn't set out to study nightmares. His study simply looked at male and female college students who strongly identified themselves as either liberal (left) or conservative (right), and analyzed many different characteristics of their dreams.
Bulkeley collected "recent dream reports" from over 400 college students between 1996 and 2001. The students provided information about their political views as a part of a survey that asked several different questions about political beliefs. Most college students did not identify a strong affiliation with any political ideology, but some did. Bulkeley wanted to study the dreams of equal numbers of male conservatives, female conservatives, male liberals, and female liberals. Only 14 males identified themselves as conservatives, so 14 students from each of the other groups were randomly chosen for the study. Dreams were "coded using the Hall and Van de Castle content analysis categories for characters, social interactions, emotions, settings, misfortunes, and good fortunes." Bulkeley further notes that "each dream was coded by myself and one or two additional researchers who were blind to the political affiliation of the dreamers and the overall purpose of the study."
Here are some of the results that did not make the headlines:
- People on the left were more likely to have females as characters in their dreams, while people on the right dreamed twice as much about male characters as about female characters.
- People on the left had fewer familiar characters, fewer friends, more family members, and fewer animals; people on the right had more familiar characters, more friends, fewer family members, and more animals.
- People on the left were less often the initiator of aggressive interactions in their dreams, and their aggression was less physical in nature; people on the right were more often the aggressors in their dreams, and their aggression was more often physical.
- People on the left had a greater number of dreams involving friendliness and good fortune, and fewer dreams involving misfortune; people on the right had a greater number of dreams with misfortunes, and fewer dreams with friendliness and good fortune.
- Male rights had the lowest percentage of family members and instances of sexuality, and the highest percentage of animal characters and being the aggressor.
- Male lefts had the highest frequency of female characters, and the fewest instances of aggression.
- Female lefts had the lowest percentage of being the aggressor in their dreams, and the highest frequency of friendliness and good fortunes.
- Female rights had the highest frequency of sexual interactions and physical aggression. (Bulkeley, 2001)
Bulkeley goes on to summarize his results in the following manner:
People on the right had more nightmares and dreams in which they lacked power. They had a greater frequency of lifelike dreams. Female rights were especially anxious about family relationships, and male rights had dreams almost devoid of girlfriends. People on the left had fewer nightmares and more dreams in which they had power. They had a greater frequency of good fortunes and bizarre elements in their dreams. Female lefts had an especially high frequency of good fortunes, and male lefts had an unusually high percentage of female characters. (Bulkeley, 2001)
This is a pilot study that needs to be replicated with a larger sample before we can draw any real conclusions. Bulkeley was constrained by the small number of conservative males in his sample, and he presents his results without the benefit of statistics. He is cautious about trying to explain the results, and he acknowledges that his own political views may color his interpretation. He reports being surprised that party officials felt the need to comment on his study.
