Dreams have been widely shared, analyzed, and explored for centuries. Throughout cultures and contexts, some dreams seem to leave a lasting trace on waking life, whereas other dreams are forgotten as quickly as they appear. This thesis focuses its efforts on the former category, known as impactful dreams. Impactful dreams are rare and distinguished by their effect on the dreamer’s thoughts, feelings, and/or behavior. Some dreams, including impactful dreams, also contain threatening oneiric material, which may be seen as mirroring threatening content the dreamer will have to face, or has already faced, in waking life. This thesis contributes to the study of dream content by using modern dream analysis methods to investigate impactful dreams and threats in dreams, drawing from a large normative sample of Canadians’ dreams, but also from the oneiric content found in works written by William Shakespeare. It was expected that both samples would share certain oneiric traits, but that Shakespeare’s in-play dreams would contain more oneiric threats, would have an impact on the dreamer by default, and would most notably affect the narrative of the play. In contrast, normative Canadian dreams were expected to show a lesser tendency towards both impact and threatening content. The first article explores all impactful dreams found within a normative sample of Canadian dreams, investigating their impactful dream type and their link to waking and dreaming mood. The second article does the same within the scope of Shakespeare’s fictional works, and compares the two samples in terms of dream impact, threats, and overall oneiric content.

A dream can impact a person so profoundly that it may permanently alter his or her life, beliefs, or behaviour. Most of the time, these gifts of insight happen to only a rare few and usually occur without intention. These life-altering dreams are spontaneous and unpredictable. While most studies focus on the content or meaning of dreams after they occur, this study explores the possibility of using dreams to influence behavioural changes in the waking world. This study examined three of the dream elements associated with profound dreams that could potentially be used to develop a systematic method of using dreams to create behavioural changes. The three elements are (a) Emotion: the ability to generate high-emotion states within a dream; (b) Narrative: the formation of narratives within a dream; and (c) Reality: the ability of the dreamer to perceive and accept the dream as reality. This study was conducted using a qualitative research design with a narrative analysis approach in order to explore and understand the subjective experiences of two participants. Data were collected through the participants‘ interviews and dream journals to help determine themes emerging from each of the participants‘ individual experiences. The themes were then analysed for any information regarding the three elements of dreaming as well as the dreams‘ personal significance to the dreamer. Further analysis explored whether lucid or non-lucid dreaming was able to intentionally produce an experientially-based shift in a specific target behaviour. The results of this research study suggest that there is potential for using dreams to induce behavioural change. The research provided a preliminary inquiry into this new field of dream therapy. This exploration of key elements to a potential dream method may prove essential to defining a basic framework and the tools that may be required to implement a new dream method. Future studies are necessary to uncover the correct combination of elements that will produce profound dream experiences at will. / Psychology / Ph. D. (Psychology)