Another surprising result of the study was that the students did not dream more frequently about people to whom they have an emotional attachment.

Whether a potential subject was a close friend or a casual acquaintance had no bearing on how often he or she appeared in the students’ dreams.

“The students were just as likely to dream about a crush as they were about a normal person. The emotional attachment made no difference in how often they appeared in the dreams. Suppression was the only main difference,” Wegner said.

Wegner said that this finding on emotion differentiates the study’s results from Freud’s. While the study claims that dreams reflect people’s suppressed thoughts but do not depend on an emotional connection, Freud claimed that emotional connections were an important factor in interpreting dreams.

But like Freud’s psychoanalysis, these findings may have some interesting therapeutic applications.

Wegner said that since people who suffer from stress or depression often tend to have nightmares, the contents of dreams may then help to determine the problems that a person encounters during the day.

“Dreams reflect what people try not to think about. It would be interesting to see if bad dreams would occur less if people allowed themselves to think about negative topics rather than suppressing them,” Kozak said.

Professor of Psychology Daniel T. Gilbert said that the scientific community has favorably received the study, viewing it as an important step in understanding the functioning of the human mind.

Gilbert described Wegner’s research as an “elegant and potentially important study that extends his groundbreaking research on the consequences of thought suppression and mental control into the world of dreams.”