wallpapercave.com/According to Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, every individual deams every night and throughout the night (p 16). “Every Westerner has had a least 1 dream about purchasing something, receiving a letter, taking an exam, making a phone call, riding in an auto, traveling by plane or ship, swimming or being in the water, visiting the doctor, watching a fire, going to the theater, and being in a confined or underground place.”  Dreams of being chased and attacked, or sex and aggression, of success and failure, or frustration and gratificaton, of food and eating, or animals and supernatural beings, of famly members, friends and strangers, of individuals and groups, of falling and flying — are universal.

How was this information arrived at?  Hall and Nordby studied over 50,000 dreams. Using new methods of quantifying content, they produced a “Content analysis” of dreams as reported in their book “The Individual and His Dreams.” (1972, New American Library).

Next to the house, the auto is the most frequently mentioned object in dreams….Misfortunes outnumber good fortunes by 6 to 1.  Fear, apprehension, anxiety and guilt as a category outnumber “happy” emotions by more than 4 to 1. The least common emotion is sadness.

They report that many more bad things than good things happen to the dreamer in his dreams, without exception, in their experience. People everywhere appear basically insecure. The authors believe that the hostility in dreams  is a projection of the dreamer’s own hostility, and that man’s insecurity stems more from his own nature than his environment.