The first thing I heard when I woke up yesterday morning was “I just almost killed a guy!” Believe it or not, I wasn’t at a crime scene—I was safe in my own bed, trying to catch my last precious moments of shut-eye before I faced the workday. My husband, on the other hand, was apparently in grave danger. Fortunately, I know him so well that I could guess right away that he wasn’t even fully awake yet, despite his vigorous grunts and kicks as he defended himself from his imaginary assailant. But his outburst got me thinking—is it just my husband who seems to have violent dreams on a regular basis, or is it a phenomenon that men in general experience? And what about women—do they also spend their nights fighting off attackers, or do they dream about babies and clothes and other stereotypically female subjects?
Separate but Equal
Overwhelming evidence indicates that men and women do have significantly disparate dreams, most likely because of differences in both biology and social conditioning. A 1994 study by pioneering psychologist Robert Van de Castle found that dreams may be sex-differentiated in children as young as age three. Children appear to dream about aggression with equal frequency until age twelve, but then, as kids start to mature sexually, girls’ dreams begin to involve less aggression and focus increasingly on emotions, talking, and physical appearance. Meanwhile, one of every four characters a dreaming male encounters before he reaches his thirties is aggressive in some way, according to a study by dream analyst Calvin Hall.
When people mature, differences between men’s and women’s dreams become even more pronounced. In 2009, British psychologist Jennie Parker invited one hundred women and ninety-three men between ages eighteen and twenty-five to record their dreams in journals. After studying the journals’ content, Parker reached two primary conclusions: 1) women have nightmares more often than men do, and 2) men dream about sex more often and more intensely than women do. Women’s bad dreams fell under three general categories—fearful dreams, confused dreams, and dreams of losing a loved one—and involved more misfortune, negative self-perceptions, and failures than men’s unpleasant dreams. Of the dream journals Parker collected, the men’s journals contained more references to sexual intercourse, whereas the women’s recorded sexual dreams were tamer, involving kissing or merely fantasizing sexually about other characters in their dreams.
