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The 2000 election caused 'most troubled night's sleep in the country's history'
Study links nightmares to a dreamer's brand of political ideology
Thursday, July 12, 2001
By JOHN WILDERMUTH
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
BERKELEY, Calif. -- The midnight hours are a lot scarier for Republicans than for Democrats, according to a new study.
Conservative Republicans have three times as many nightmares as liberal Democrats, and those nightmares tend to feature aggression, misfortune and physical threats, said dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley, who teaches at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.
"The prevalence of nightmares among people on the right was striking," said Bulkeley, who described himself as a Democrat raised in a Republican family.
Bulkeley is the first to admit that his study, which he was to present at a meeting of the American Association for the Study of Dreams at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is not the most comprehensive project ever done.
The results are based on dreams reported by 56 college students, half of whom identified themselves as Republicans on the right and half of whom called themselves left-leaning Democrats.
"The sample size is small, but the people involved are highly committed ideologically, so that makes a difference," Bulkeley said.
Nightmares in general are characterized by fear and other negative emotions, he said, and often include a feeling of helplessness in the face of threats.
They can be so intense that people wake up sweating and gasping for breath.
Nightmares among the group studied included examination fears, fighting a corpse in a car and being trapped in a public bathroom with bears and a gun that doesn't work.
Republicans also were much more likely to have lifelike dreams that resembled their daily lives, while the Democrats often had bizarre dreams, with unfamiliar characters and settings and events that are improbable or impossible.
Does that mean that conservatives are more realistic while liberals are more imaginative, or are Republicans perhaps more insecure, anxious and repressed and Democrats perhaps more irrational, deluded and utopian?
Any or all of that could be true, Bulkeley said. "I'm trying to see how dream content reflects cultural phenomena, like politics," he said.
The 2000 election caused what Bulkeley believes was "the single most troubled night's sleep in the country's history."
By the time George W. Bush was finally named president nearly a month after Election Day, there was a sharp drop in reports of politically related dreams, Bulkeley said.
"People seemed sick of the whole thing," he said in his paper.
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