What your dreams reveal about your personality

If you’ve gone to university it might impact your dreams. Here’s what your dreams might say about your personality. 

Everyone loves to unpack a dream — but what do they say about your personality?

One American study set out to find just that. In a survey, researchers asked 1000 people to do a personality test before revealing what kind of dreams they had in order to determine the personalities that most often experienced particular types of dreams.

The Best Mattress Brand research revealed introverts were more likely to dream of being unable to influence the world around them and dreamt more often of punching without effect.

Extroverts, however, dreamt of more active pursuits, such as travelling.

Introverts dream of their teeth falling out 14.2 per cent more often than extroverts. Extroverts also remember dreams more often than introverts.

Those inclined toward an intuitive type of personality were likely to dream of threatening outcomes, such as being attacked, or even killed.

Thinking types were more likely to dream of killing someone.

Other research from Germany’s Central Institute of Mental Health found individuals who had dreams about killing someone tended to be more introverted, yet also more aggressive, in real life.

Alice Robb, author of Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey, told The Verge one idea was that people dream about things they were suppressing during the day.

There’s a theory from evolutionary psychology that’s pretty popular, and it argues that dreams have a survival function, she said.

They give us a chance to practice for things we’re stressed out about in real life.

That would explain why dreams are predominantly negative.

Dreams tend to be much more about anxiety than about pleasure and involve a lot of intense feelings and fear.

IF YOU’VE STUDIED
A 2014 American study by dream education group DreamsCloud found that people with more degrees are more likely to dream about work, colleagues and missing deadlines.

Dream researcher Dr Angel Morgan told The Huffington Post people were most likely to dream about what concerned them the most.

When you look at education level, what concerns us most is going to be reflected and influenced in our dreams … it just makes sense, she said.

IF YOU’RE A LUCID DREAMER
That same year a study by the University of Lincoln in the UK suggested that lucid dreamers were likely to have better problem-solving skills in reality.

Results show that frequent lucid dreamers solve significantly more insight problems overall than non-lucid dreamers, the researchers said.

This suggests that the insight experienced during the dream state may relate to the same underlying cognition needed for insight in the waking state.

IF YOU’RE CREATIVE
Creative people place their dreams in unusual, varied settings, compared to the more frequent home dreams of less creative people.

They’re also said to dream of creative pursuits, loss, children and trying to overcome obstacles in nature such as a log or a rock they can’t get around.

That said, there’s still a lot of research being done into the science behind dreams, an area we still know little about.