People in love remember 30% more of their dreams.

People in love remember 30% more of their dreams.

I saw this post on the psychology tags a few hours ago and it sounded interesting. I’ve heard similar things about “people in love” having some sort of advantage over others so I wanted to see if this was true. A quick Google search revealed many pages on tumblr, google+, and random blogs and forums where this “fact” was shared but none had a source or reference. You’d think that something so popular was bound to have an easy-to-find source.

I looked through the APA (American Psychological Association) database which, mind you, has over 160,000 scholarly journal articles, and yet I still found nothing. I expanded the search to include journal articles that were not from APA (e.g. scholarly journals from other countries, associations, or scientific fields in the social sciences) and I only found one article that talked about something remotely related to love and dream recall.

McNamara and his coauthors (2001) wanted to know if there was an association between attachment styles and dream recall. The study involved 300 college students with an average age of 19. Contrary to the quote above, the study demonstrated that students who scored high on an “insecure attachment” scale were significantly more likely to report dream frequency, meaning, students who were more insecure in their interpersonal relationships (e.g. family, friend, or love relationships, etc.) reported having dreams more frequently.

That’s about all I could find on interpersonal relationships and dream recall. After doing the research I now believe the quote is bunk. I could be wrong. Yet, if the quote was right, wasn’t I bound to find something somewhere? If you guys know where this, “people in love remember 30% more of their dreams,” quote originated from, let me know and I’ll post about it. Otherwise, I think it’s safe to say it’s false.

Reference

McNamara, P., Andresen, J., Clark, J., Zborowski, M., & Duffy, C. (2001). Impact of attachment styles on dream recall and dream content: A test of attachment hypothesis of REM sleep. Journal of Sleep Research, 10(2). 117-127.