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Daydream Believers Trust in dreams often exceeds reality 
Waking up from a dream - good or bad - leads most people to ask the same elusive question: What was that all about? "Psychologists' interpretations of the meaning of dreams vary widely," says Carey Morewedge, assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. "But our research shows that people believe their dreams provide meaningful insight into themselves and their world." Morewedge and his colleagues combined data from six separate studies of nearly 1,100 people about the meaning inherent in their dreams. One study, conducted by Morewedge and Michael Norton, assistant professor at Harvard Business School, surveyed 149 university students in the U.S., India and South Korea, and found that a vast majority, believe dreams reveal deeper truths about themselves and the world. For another survey, Morewedge polled 182 commuters at a Boston train station, asking them to imagine that one of four possible scenarios had happened the night before a scheduled airline trip: The national threat level was raised to orange, indicating a high risk of terrorist attack; they consciously thought about their plane crashing; they dreamed about a plane crash; or a real plane crash occurred on the route they planned to take. Results found that a dream of a plane crash was more likely to cause people to change their travel plans than either thinking about a crash or an actual terrorism warning. Morewedge says that more research is needed to fully understand how people interpret their dreams and how often dreams actually reveal hidden information."Most people understand that dreams are unlikely to predict the future but that doesn't prevent them from finding meaning in their dreams, whether their contents are mundane or bizarre," Morewedge says.
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