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Ian Morton's picture

First or Third Person Dreaming?

Submitted by Ian Morton on Tue, 04/24/2007 - 2:27am.

Do we tend to dream in the first person or the third person?  I cannot remember most of my dreams, but I seem to recall that I have dreamed in both a narrative and first person format, but is one more frequent than the other?  What mechanism controls whether we will dream in the first-person or as an observer?  It seems that first person dreaming reflects our subjective identity, while in third person dreaming is indicative of our mind’s ability to represent our Self as an object.  Does how we dream then reflect our state of mind?  That is, does a first person dream suggest that one is accepting one’s place in a situation, while a third person dream suggests that one is analyzing and trying to make sense of one’s place in a situation?  Do different forms of dream narrative correspond to different kinds of dreams/different situations in the dream? 

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