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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

EV0997

Typical dreams in the general population of India

TYPICAL DREAMS IN THE GENERAL POPULATION OF INDIA

The prevalence of typical dream themes in the general population of India was found to be highly correlated with findings from studies in other countries, but culturally specific themes, such as snakes and encounters with God, were prominent.

The study aimed to determine the prevalence of typical dreams in the general population of India, as previous research had focused primarily on university students. Nielsen and colleagues’ 55-item questionnaire was administered to 301 individuals; 47.5% of the sample were men and 52.5% were women, with 61.5% from urban and 38.5% from rural backgrounds, spanning a broad range of educational levels. Statistical analyses included rank correlations and principal component factor analysis with Varimax rotation and Kaiser normalization. All participants answered every question, and item prevalence ranged from 1% to 52.7%. The prevalence rankings in this study showed highly statistically significant positive correlations with those in other studies: 0.587 for Nielsen et al. 2003; 0.557 for Schredl et al. 2004; 0.675 for Yu et al. 2008; 0.682 for Liang et al. 2022; 0.773 for Li et al. 2023; and 0.682 for Sharma et al. 2025 (all p < 0.001). The data were found to be suitable for factor analysis (KMO 0.504; Bartlett’s test of sphericity 0.000), and a 20-factor solution explaining 74.7% of the variance was obtained using an eigenvalue cutoff of 1 and a factor loading threshold of 0.30. The five most prevalent themes in this sample were snakes, eating delicious food, seeing a deceased person alive, schoolteachers, and encountering God in some form. Snakes and encounters with God loaded onto the same factor, while sexuality was less prominent than in Western studies and loaded onto the same factor as travel to other planets and outer space. The authors interpret the findings as supporting the universality of typical dream themes while also indicating that cultural influences systematically modify these themes.

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