An international team of scientists from Switzerland, Canada, Tanzania, the USA, Congo and other countries studied the differences in the content of dreams between representatives of modern Western society and people from African communities with a traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Experts concluded that bad dreams may have encouraged people to unite and help each other at the dawn of civilization. The study was published in the scientific journal magazine Scientific Reports (SciRep).
The team collected data for months by talking to the Bayaka people in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Hadza people in Tanzania. Tribe members talked about their dreams.
The scientists then compared the dream content of African natives with the dream content of those living in Switzerland, Belgium and Canada. It turns out that members of traditional communities are much more likely to see scenes of cooperation, collaboration, and mutual aid at night.
For example, African tribesmen occasionally dream of falling into a well or finding themselves in a similar situation. As a rule, during a person’s sleep, fellow tribesmen often come to his aid.
By comparison, nightmares in modern Western societies tend to be more disturbing and lack the element of reciprocity. Typical nightmare scenarios, especially in the West, involve the sudden loss of close relatives or separation from a partner.
According to scientists, the differences in the content of dreams reflect the difference in the conditions in which the indigenous peoples of Africa and people in the modern world exist. Traditional tribes do not have social support systems, so they must rely on each other. Researchers believe that in prehistoric times, nightmares may have served as a kind of virtual reality, depicting various dangerous situations and ways to cope with them, contributing to collective survival.
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