Sci-fest

Our project for sci-fest is called 'Understanding Dreams'.For our project we decided to investigate the factors that influence a person’s dreams and the dream content. Our idea came to us when we were discussing a dream that one of our team members had recently experienced. Within the dream, she explained that characters from the television programs she had been watching the previous evening had been present in the dream. She also mentioned that she had eaten cheese before bed and thought this was a factor contributing to her bad dream, due to the circulation of the popular rumour about the consumption of cheese before bed.

This sparked our interest. We decided we would like to look into the factors which influence our dreams and there content. We also decided to look into the meanings of some of the most common dreams that people have.

We compiled surveys which were handed out to ten students in each year from 1^st to 6^th year and also ten teachers in our school. These surveys consisted of several multiple choice questions related to dreams. For example- do you tend to remember your dreams; what do you tend to remember (people, places conversations); do characters from TV programmes and books appear in your dreams?). We then collected these surveys and put the results onto bar charts and pie charts. We also asked if people would be interested in taking part in further studies.

For our test group of 10 people who said yes, we compiled a dream diary for each participant. Each participant will have a dream diary in which they will record information related to their dream. For example, did they have a good or bad dream, what they watched before bed, whether they were active before bed, and what they ate. This was all established through some short, easy to answer questions.

This was done over a five day period. Then all diaries were collected and the information read through and analysed. We also took the information from the first set of surveys into account and statistics formed from that information also. Then we formed statistics and presented them on a graph.

We then looked into the most common factors that affect dreams, and the most common types of dreams. Once the top ten different dreams had been established, we looked into the meaning and the significance of said dreams.