The purpose of the research: Cartwright decided to carry out a more extensive study involving a very personally relevant suggestion prior to sleep to see if the topic of the suggestion would then appear in the person’s dreams that night. Cartwright argued that if you were to make a pre-sleep wish about something that was personally relevant to you, it would be more likely to enter your dreams in some way.
Research Methods: The participants of the study were 17 paid college students. 10 of which were male and 7 of them were female, all claimed to be good sleepers. All 17 participants slept 2 nights in the sleep laboratory to get used to their surroundings. Next the participants were given a deck of 70 cards, each card containing 1 personal adjective. The participants were the asked to sort the cards into seven categories, ranging from 1 (“least like me”) to 7 (“most like me”). After they finished they were then given another deck identical to the one before, and asked to sort this deck as they would for the person …show more content…
When they studied the transcripts they looked for the presence of the three adjectives (target and two controls). What they found was that their interpretations of the dream content agreed 85 percent of the time, which meant that they were quite reliable and accurate. The first prediction made at the beginning of Cartwrights article- that dreams following a wish about a personal relevant topic would reflect that topic- which was supported by the fact that 15 of the 17 subjects dreamed about the target adjective in some way. Of the 15 subjects who dreamed of the target word, only two had dreams which the opposite of the target was describing the self. This according to Cartwright, supported her second prediction: that the way you explore a problem in your dreams is different from when you are awake and thinking about