Disasters and Sports in Dreams: Unexpected Selectivity in Dream Incorporation

Population-level indicators of interest in dream-related topics were analyzed using Google Trends for California, Texas, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom—areas with a combined population of more than 250 million—as well as at the global level. Media-salient natural disasters are reflected in dreams. The relative representation of sports-related and disaster-related content was compared between ordinary searches and dream-related searches.Although sports overwhelmingly dominated waking interest, disaster-related content was represented about 24 times as strongly in dream-related searches as expected based on its relative share of ordinary searches. This pattern indicates that content dominating conscious attention need not dominate dreams, a finding difficult to explain in terms of either classical predictors of incorporation. We propose that existing accounts fail to capture a mechanism that grants certain types of content privileged status as dream material. We introduce Phantom Anxiety Theory, which proposes that the human anxiety system assigns special priority to “safe threats”—objects or events that appear threatening but are remote and require no immediate action. The theory further posits that the anxiety system operates with relative autonomy in monitoring the environment and processing stimuli, including in the selection of dream content.