V S Bose
Professor of Psychology
PhD Dissertation
My PhD Dissertation was in the field of Psychology of Sleep and Dreams. A brief synopsis of the same is given below for those of you who might be interested.
My PhD dissertation is on Dream Content Transformation: An Experimental Investigation of Freud's Secondary Revision Hypothesis.
The study is based on home dreams (written by the subjects at home); three different types of laboratory dream reports namely a) Morning dream reports (subjects sleep in the sleep laboratory with all the electrodes hooked up and the EEG running all through nights but subjects were not awakened during REM periods and their dream reports were collected only the next morning); b) REM reports (dream reports collected immediately after the dream stage is over as per the EEG recordings); and c) Re-recalled dream reports (morning reports of the REM reports reported during the night).
The study was conducted on 50 university male students in the age group of 20- 26 years each one of them sleeping for 11 nights in the sleep laboratory. The first night was considered as a trial/adaptation night and the dream reports of that night were not used for the study.
All the home dreams, morning dream reports and re-recalled dream reports were compared to that of REM dreams to see if they differ in any particular way. Significant differences were seen in some of the content variables like friendly interactions, aggressive interactions, sexual interactions, misfortunes, setting etc., indicating that there were systematic changes in the morning dream report. These results suggest that, as Freud hypothesized, some revisions take place in dream reporting, without our knowledge.
My PhD dissertation was referred to by many American sleep/dream researchers as an unpublished PhD dissertation. That piece of work was considered exceptional and the American examiner who adjudicated my PhD thesis recommended that the university award me (if such a provision exists) with a PhD Honors. I was nominated Corresponding Member, Sleep Research Society, USA from the year 1983/84 onwards on the basis of this work.